Lucy Boynton Updates High Fidelity With a Magical Realist Twist
DIRECTOR: NED BENSON/2024
If a song has ever taken you back in time, Harriet knows exactly what you’re talking about.
But Harriet (Lucy Boynton) doesn’t just get emotional when she hears a song that reminds her of her boyfriend Max (David Corenswet)—her mind actually travels back to the time she first heard it. For two years, she’s been reliving their kisses, fights, and everything in between, and for two years, she’s been trying to change the past to save Max’s life. But on the anniversary of his death, something finally changes: She meets David (Justin H. Min) in a grief support group, and for the first time, she considers taking off her headphones to let in new music.
Lucy Boynton is building a nice little canon of musically-bent movies between Sing Street, Bohemian Rhapsody, Chevalier, and now The Greatest Hits. Though the quality of this filmography has varied wildly, her magnetism has prevailed. She’s becoming one of my top draft picks to lead a big studio rom-com or another original movie as winsome as The Greatest Hits aspires to be, which is something akin to an updated High Fidelity with a magical realist twist. Like John Cusack, Boynton is charismatic enough to propel us through an episodic playlist of her romantic history—this script just doesn’t have the same precision in its depiction of music junkies or the critique of the immature male psyche that made that turn-of-the-millennium rom-com memorable.
The Greatest Hits is perfectly watchable, looks much better than a straight-to-Hulu release needs to, and doesn’t overstay its welcome at 94 minutes. In its best moments, such as Harriet’s opening time travel sequence, it scratches a particular creative itch I’m partial to: story told through soundtrack. These borderline-musicals tend to appear in the form of romantic dramedies (see (500) Days of Summer, Paper Towns, and Yesterday), stylized action-adventures (such as Baby Driver, Guardians of the Galaxy, and Grosse Pointe Blank, which reminds me I’m ready for Cusack’s Hollywood comeback), or visions from hip auteurs (like Sofia Coppola, John Hughes, and Quentin Tarantino). The soundtrack for The Greatest Hits, fortunately, is not a literal collection of Top 40 hits but an idiosyncratic selection of oldies (Patti Jo, Peggy Lee), ’80s synth (The The, Roxy Music), what I call “hipster indie smash” (Beach House, Phoebe Bridgers, Lana Del Rey, Jamie xx), and original compositions by Son Lux alum Ryan Lott. (Please don’t @ me, High Fidelity-heads—I’m not a music critic.)
This is graciously not a superhero origin story that gets lost in trying to explain the science of its magic, but it could have used more exploration of a science called chemistry. Writer/director Ned Benson finds a visual style but little character development, which slows its intriguing premise to a sleepy pace. No disrespect to Corenswet and Min, who both have resumes suggesting talent, but pretty much any two good-lookin’ fellas could have filled out their corners of this love triangle. Neither Max nor David have personality traits beyond “nice,” “handsome,” and—in David’s case—“sad,” and when your two romantic choices are this dull, it removes all tension from your story.
