Mark Reviews Movies: PRESS PLAY

Press Play, The Avenue

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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 23, 2022

The central gimmick of Press Play probably sounds a bit silly on paper: This is the story of a mixtape—as in an actual cassette tape with music recorded on it—that makes time travel possible. Surprisingly, though, that's not a problem within the context of director Greg Björkman and James Bachelor's screenplay, which doesn't harp on the gimmick or try to explain it or much care, really, if we find the idea to be ridiculous.

The movie simply presents and accepts the conceit, because it has other ideas to explore. Ultimately, the movie's unwillingness to present those bigger ideas with the same level of acceptance as the gimmick is its unfortunate downfall.

There's quite a bit to admire about the way Björkman and Bachelor set themselves up to fall down in the end, though. Here, we meet Laura (Clara Rugaard), an aspiring artist living somewhere near the coast of sunny California. Her best friend Chloe (Lyrica Okano) has been wanting to set up Laura and the friend's brother Harrison (Lewis Pullman) for a while, but Laura has been too busy with school and painting to think about such things. Anyway, they meet at the record shop where Harrison works, and there's enough of a connection for Laura to ask him out to a concert.

The rest of their romance is given a hasty but charming-and-endearing treatment. Laura tells Harrison how her father, who died when she was 15 (Her mother or any other kind of parental figure is nowhere to be found in this story, because such a character wouldn't fit into the plotting the screenwriters have concocted), inspired her artistic leanings. Harrison explains how his father (played by Matt Walsh), a doctor, has been pressuring him to follow the old man's career path, but he's more than happy to work at the store, do his surfing, and just be happy with his life.

It's nothing special, save for the easy-going chemistry the two actors bring to the material, as well as how it frames the course of it through everyday moments with some noteworthy backdrop (the neon lighting of a club or the sunset view of the ocean from a clifftop) and/or development (Harrison explaining he's going to bypass medical school to be with her and the two finally saying they love each other). Basically, the love story possesses just enough in terms of not-too-sappy lovey-dovey stuff and a hint of conflict for us to believe it. That's all we need to do, because the real story begins when the romance ends.

On his way to the beach to surf, Harrison is hit by a speeding pickup truck and killed. Four years later, Laura is still grieving, and at Chloe's wedding, Cooper (Danny Glover), the owner of the record store, gives Laura the mixtape she and Harrison had been making—the one she left behind on the store's wall of lost and forgotten mixtapes. Later that night, she plays the tape on an old portable cassette player, and somehow, she is transported back in time to the night of their first date—but only for the course of the song that's playing in the background.

The plot, then, has Laura listening to each song, traveling back in time to the moment the couple first heard the tune, and trying to change the course of the past in order to save Harrison's life. Some of the smarter decisions here include the fact that Harrison does believe the future Laura's warnings—or, at least, don't want to risk the alternative—and the desperate nature of Rugaard's performance. In a way, limiting Laura's treks back to the past to the span of a single song means that we have neither the time nor the opportunity to pick apart how the rules of time travel work in this setup.

Without giving too much of how things do change for Laura and the people around her in the present day, there's also a clever and almost devious approach to the material in how the filmmakers focus exclusively on the unforeseen results of Laura's meddling. On the other hand, there's no sense of how and why the altered past leads to those changes. However, looking at this as a story about consequences and missing the bigger picture of being given a second chance with a deceased loved one (The widower Cooper gets a couple speeches about that), such mechanics are almost unnecessary for the filmmakers to detail or for us to really comprehend.

Whether or not Björkman and Bachelor actually care as much about the underlying themes as they do the conceit of their time-travel gimmick is another matter, though. The story is in such a rush to show the various alternative futures Laura creates that it quickly loses track of the bittersweet potential within it. Just as with the way Press Play bypasses the logic of and within its assorted timelines, the movie also sidesteps the deeper ideas about the persistence of grief, love, and the fleeting nature of things for a tale that's mostly about plotting, as well as a conclusion that tosses out the movie's entire philosophy for a disingenuous act of cheating.

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