MÚSICA - Mark Reviews Movies

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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 3, 2024

The protagonist of Música hears the world differently than most. The sounds of everyday life become a rhythm for Rudy, played by co-writer/director Rudy Mancuso, and from there, a melody and, in his more imaginative moments, a counter-melody emerge. It's just part of who Rudy is, and the film lets us experience it along with him.

That makes Mancuso's debut feature technically a musical, although the songs are often wordless and don't exist to explain the plot or move it forward. Instead, the film simply revels in the music, shifting the aspect ratio to a wider frame so as to take in Rudy's flights of fancy—seeing people dancing along to the tunes they're unwittingly creating, even as they're really just sweeping floors, dribbling a basketball, playing jump-rope, and cutting up fish at the local Brazilian grocer. There's a kind of magic to it, although Rudy isn't entirely convinced his music-focused mind is a good thing for him right now.

Yes, this story is partially a musical, but it's also a coming-of-age tale about a young man who knows exactly what he wants to do with his life but feels too much external pressure to fully commit to it. Beyond that, it's an amusingly convoluted romantic comedy that has Rudy juggling his feelings for two women.

That's a setup filled with likely trouble and some obvious comedic potential, but even as Mancuso and Dan Lagana's screenplay gives us some familiar scenarios and bits, there's some element that adds unexpected depth or humor to the proceedings. It's one thing, for example, for a guy to end up in a restaurant with both of the women he's technically dating at the moment, but here, the film gives us a running commentary on the mess Rudy has made from a source that only the musically-inclined guy can understand. The scene might be the stuff of a sitcom, but the filmmakers give it that little extra push so it feels just different enough and perfectly in line with how Rudy sees the world.

After all, that's really what this story is about, following Rudy through his uncertain life in Newark, New Jersey. He still lives with his overbearing mother Maria (played by Mancuso's real-life mother, who shares the same name and clearly is quite the good sport about the character). She's always in her son's business, grilling him about his love life, his schooling, his career prospects, and everything else, and there's a funny moment when the two just listen to each other listening to each other between the wall of the hallway and Rudy's bedroom. It's a perfect summary of their relationship, really.

Maria does have good reason to worry. Rudy's life is packed, what with going to college for a degree in marketing he only agreed to obtain for his mother's sake, spending his nights in the subway performing a puppet show for spare change, and dating Haley (Francesca Reale), a young woman from a well-to-do family who has their whole life together planned out for them. In the opening scene, Rudy is distracted by the music being made by the customers and staff at a local diner, and because this is not an isolated occurrence, an annoyed Haley ends their years-long relationship right then and there.

At first, Rudy wants to get himself and his life in order, hoping to convince Haley to date him again, but then, he spots Isabella (Camila Mendes) at the grocery store. He's so distracted by her that he doesn't notice the packaged fish flying at his head, and Mendes brings such effortless charm to the role that we understand.

More importantly, her character gets Rudy—really gets him. They start spending time together, and Rudy eventually explains his quirky ability to hear music everywhere and anywhere. He tries to show her in a nifty sequence, similar to the others of Rudy's musical imaginings but especially compelling in how Mancuso stages it with his character serving as a kind of conductor of the ordinary.

After all of that, Isabella admits she can't hear it, but she can feel Rudy hearing it. There's a subtle way that the film gives these two women lives, thoughts, and feelings outside of our main character, mainly in the independent attitude Mendes has in the role but also in how a scene with Haley's family, who are as thoughtless around their daughter's first-generation immigrant boyfriend as we'd anticipate, gives a sense of why she's so desperate to get out of this place.

Such little details make the romantic-comedy elements convincing and give them some grounded stakes, because Rudy doesn't want to but inevitably will hurt one or both of these women by keeping up his charade. The bigger details, though, are filled with clever formal ideas, such as a one-take of Rudy's routine that plays out like a stage show with changing sets and costumes, and humor. In the latter category, J.B. Smoove plays a food truck vendor who gives contradictory advice, and Rudy's puppet, a mustachioed felt singer, serves as his conscience. There's an off-beat energy to all of this that keeps the material light on its feet and unpredictable, even if the narrative course of this story unfolds in a straightforward way.

It's not what the story is that matters, after all, but how the film tells that tale. Música does so with creative verve, comedy that's goofy but wholly in tune with the world it creates, and a genuine adoration for music and performance. It also displays a degree care for its characters that, especially once the complications are finished, goes a bit deeper than its romantic-comedy plotting.

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