Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Flora and Son’ on Apple TV+, a Delightfully Light Musical Love Story From John Carney

Put down your dukes, for John Carney has made another charming “stealth musical” in Flora and Son (now on Apple TV+). The writer-director is best known for the hit Once, which won a Best Original Song Oscar and became a successful stage musical, and he followed up with similar sort-of-musicals Begin Again and Sing Street. This time, he casts not a musician but the offspring of one, Eve Hewson, daughter of Bono and star of The Knick and Bad Sisters, who shows significant actorly acumen in a breakout performance that’s more about singing a little bit here and there – and enjoys terrific chemistry with her co-star, Joseph Gordon-Levitt. This is one of those movies that you watch and wonder if it might be the first step toward world peace, and here’s why.

FLORA AND SON: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: There are few things sadder than an abandoned guitar. Most likely, some poor soul gave up on one of the most beautiful and poignant means of artistic expression. But Flora (Hewson) still sees hope in this one sticking out of a junkpile in the bed of a truck. It has worn-out spots on the finish and it’s missing a tuning peg, but give it a little TLC and it’ll be humming a C-minor before you know it. She thinks it might give her wayward son Max (Oren Kinlan) the focus he needs to stay the hell out of trouble; his caseworker just warned him, one more strike – his malfeasance of choice is petty theft – and he’s going to juvie. That’s part of the reason why Flora and Max go at it all the time, cursing each other out and calling each other horrible things. And the reason they do that might be, well, because they’re Irish.

But there’s plenty of love between them, which is the first of a few things we need to know about Flora. We first meet her trashed in a nightclub, trolling for a one-night stand. She succeeds, and when she wakes up the next morning next to a major doof, he bolts when he learns she has a son. She had Max young, at 17. She dropped out of school. She’s still youthful, with a bit of purposeless immaturity. She and Max’s father Ian (Jack Reynor) are at odds; he’s a musician, but that’s not why they’re at odds. Flora kinda seems to be at odds with everybody all the time, albeit in an amusing, endearing manner, which is confusing, but stay with me here. She works as a babysitter, and when she leaves a regular gig for an apparently well-off family, she burgles a few extra banknotes from the mom’s purse (right: that’s where Max gets it). She’s coarse and she takes no shit and she does what she has to and when young girls shake their booties for social media cameras in the parking lot of the apartment complex she makes a face like she’s smelling a moldering badger carcass and you feel like if someone needs a punch in the nose she’d do it. Are we kinda in love with her? Maybe!

As for that guitar? Well, Max didn’t show much interest. He’d rather sit at his laptop and fiddle with loops and beats, maybe rap a few lines overtop. So Flora eyeballs it. Picks it up. Finds a few instructional videos online. Lands on a Los Angelino named Jeff (Gordon-Levitt) who gives $20 one-on-ones because his hope for a music career flamed out. Sets up a lesson. And one of the first things he does is play Tom Waits’ ‘I Hope That I Don’t Fall in Love with You’ – a little audacious in its foreshadowing maybe, because she ends up flirting with him as much as he teaches her this chord and that chord, then plays her a little song he wrote, which she ends up improving with a fresh set of lyrics for the chorus, and there they are, singing it together, thousands of miles apart, and when they’re done, she makes him kinda pleasantly uncomfortable when she says it felt so intimate it was like they just had sex. So should the ’shippers begin ’shipping right about now? F—in’ hell yes they should.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Looking past Carney’s other films (I think it’s time to watch Once for the eighth or ninth time!) Flora and Son reminds me that I need to rewatch Jessie Buckley in Wild Rose, which you likely need to watch for the first time, because it’s grossly underappreciated.

Performance Worth Watching: Hewson has such a marvelously expressive face, and she finds a sweet spot in this character, between being being charming and being absolutely unapologetically herself.

Memorable Dialogue: A revealing excerpt from Jeff and Flora’s first conversation (before she asks him to take his shirt off and he abruptly hangs up):

Jeff: You could know 1,000 chords and never write something as beautiful as that.

Flora: Is that your problem?

Jeff: I didn’t know I had a problem.

Flora: You’re teaching guitar online, love.

Jeff: Right. You’re Irish.

Sex and Skin: For better or worse, nah.

Our Take: It’s no spoiler to say that Flora and Jeff aren’t the only ones in this movie making beautiful music together – I mean, what if she found a way to connect with her son by taking his raps-and-beats and adding a vocal hook here and a few guitar chords there, and this is when Flora and Son makes your heart go pop. It’s not the only time. The first time Flora and Jeff really connect through conversation, really share themselves, Carney pans slow and sweet from her face to where her laptop should be and Jeff is right there in the room, and suddenly, these two lightly wounded souls feel a little salve. He’s not really there in her kitchen, but dammit, we wish he was, and that’s when moviemaking feels magical, and we get a little misty and we soften and start to believe corny truisms, e.g., how a little music can bring people together.

It must be mentioned that there’s a calculated cuteness to the film that may rankle obdurate cynics, but in spite of the occasional contrivance of plot, my bullshit detector never went off. The writing, direction and performances are consistently funny and charming, and Carney makes maintaining a fine-tuned medium-breezy tone look easy (when it almost surely isn’t). He aims to disarm us with fuzzy-warm characters who feed their souls with song; there are no villains here, just people working their way through the relatable complexities of human relationships, with the occasional gloss of a cleverly composed dialogue exchange. He brings a light touch to melancholy yearning, and cultivates some easygoing alchemy in Hewson and Gordon-Levitt interactions, which become the heart of the story. Flora and Son offers acutely earnest storytelling that finds the squishy spot behind your emotional barriers and tickles it – and it feels pretty damn good. 

Our Call: Flora and Son is simply delightful. STREAM IT. 

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.