DANDELION (2024) - Mark Reviews Movies

Dandelion, IFC Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | July 11, 2024

It's easy to get behind the title character of Dandelion, a Cincinnati-based singer-songwriter with dreams bigger than her current circumstances. Here's a woman who has talent and fears that it is being wasted on—not to mention that it will only amount to—gigs at a local bar, where patrons treat her performances as if they're just the background music for chatting and drinking and staring at their phones. It's obvious that Dandelion is growing to resent this career standard, but she's performing regularly for money, at least.

Writer/director Nicole Riegel's movie isn't about anyone or anything new, but in the opening scenes, the filmmaker shows a clear and compassionate understanding for Dandelion (KiKi Layne), as she strums away on her electric guitar and pours her heart into the microphone, noticing that nobody in that bar is really paying attention to her but ceasing to care about that fact a few bars into the song. As we catch glimpses of her life outside of the job part of it, the story puts her passion for music to more and more real-world tests.

Eventually, Riegel decides this everyday stuff apparently isn't enough of a justification for Dandelion's story, and that's fine, perhaps, except that the movie also seems less and less interested in Dandelion on her own, too. She becomes part of a professional and romantic duo while chasing what she sees as one last opportunity to make her dream a reality, and everyone and everything surrounding Dandelion gets to teach her a lesson or two about the harshness of that reality. One could argue she already knows it quite well, but when a filmmaker doesn't trust the story of a character that's right there for the taking, can we be really certain we know that?

This quickly becomes a fish-out-of-water tale, as Dandelion leaves Ohio for a battle of the bands in South Dakota, where the winner will perform at a big concert to conclude an annual biker rally. The unlikeliness of her success there is kind of the point, since the trip west is spurred by Dandelion hitting the end of the line. In addition to the audience's disinterest and despite the regular cash, the gig at the bar isn't leading to other opportunities. After the most recent gig, she sits by the river, writing songs through the night, but who's going to listen to her instead of the musicians with larger social media followings and inheritances to waste?

Meanwhile, Dandelion's mother Jean (Melanie Nicholls-King) is suffering from emphysema and needs money for the medical bills, but when the mother shows she doesn't care about either her own health or her daughter's ambitions, Dandelion decides to hit the road. The musician sells her beloved electric guitar for a couple hundred bucks for gas money and heads to the competition.

The rest of the story takes place around the biker event, where musicians find each other for long nights of jamming around campfires outside campers, impromptu performances in alleyways behind bars, and commiserating over having to balance the day-to-day grind of making money with the constant need to make music. Dandelion may be an outsider here, since most of these musicians aren't writing and playing the kind of personal music she makes, but they welcome her, anyway, because they all get it.

Dandelion's most important connection here is with Casey (Thomas Doherty), a Scottish-born singer and guitarist who had been with a working band for almost a decade, until he decided to make a living with a "proper" job. Dandelion literally bumps into him while rushing to the stage for her chance, before being heckled by the crowd and having her guitar case stolen by a brazen member of the audience. Casey retrieves the case and return it to her, and when her car won't start to bring her back to Cincinnati, Dandelion decides to accept Casey's offer to spend time with him and the other members of the band.

The two spend whole days and nights together, hiking trails and wandering through the desert outside town, while talking about themselves and what music means to them. Riegel has a way of distancing us from these conversations, keeping the actors framed in long shots against the hills and rock formations of the landscape as the talk is heard on the soundtrack. There's a dream-like nature to these scenes, as if the filmmaker knows the discussions aren't as important as the feeling of unity between the two characters, and in a way, she's right. There's only so much that talk about the broad ideas of music and making it can reveal, and here, those conversations are all vague.

The fast bond between Dandelion and Casey is far more involving when they do create and perform music, if only because Layne and Doherty possess a fine chemistry and are right there playing and singing for us to witness. Their relationship develops through the music (written by brothers Aaron and Bryce Dessner), and if we know the other shoe is going to drop by a certain point in this story, that's mainly because Dandelion has set itself up with nowhere else to go. By the time the movie returns to the practical and personal elements of its main character's journey, the meditative nature of the movie has pushed her too much to the side of her own story.

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