While this movie could have gone in many directions and investigated interesting ideas it served up a family restaurant meal and left the audience half full, but also half empty.
I liked a lot of the set up, and the promise of the many directions it could have taken, Offerman's character getting a shot at something he missed on his first time round, the daughter's chance to give something back to her father, the option to do something you love, the transition of focus from the dad's generation of music focus to the modern day diversified focus, or any number of other interesting themes to investigate, yet it essentially ended up going nowhere.
Offerman's grumpy, dry witted, defiant smoking, bearded old American hipster was like a cliche of himself, amusing for a very short periods and then just annoying. He could have been so much more. The daughter did well when creating and performing music, she was really convincing and had a great honest performance delivery, but a little less so in her interactions with anyone else. I didn't really get much of a feeling for who she was from anything other scenes. The lesbian daughter thing felt contrived for cool points rather than a natural part of the movie, and it tried so hard to make it so.
Ted Danson's character had many possibilities and his screen time was quality time well spent, but again, he had no direction, just a handful of good situations that lead nowhere.
I enjoyed the music creation parts, but it was destination nowhere apart from that
Review of Hearts Beat Loud
