High Note is the first movie in a while that restored my trust the efficacy of writing about movies in the age of seeing everything at home, primarily alone. It’s June 24th right now, so I’m a few weeks off. I’ve actually been spending a couple of weeks writing a much, much longer piece of Last Days of American Crime and hopefully at some point I can link to it or parts of it for your perusal. In the meantime, I’ll do a short review here for this gem of a movie. Spoilers after the jump.
The High Note bills itself as a bit of Devil Wears Prada meets Hearts Beat Loud. Worries going in were that this movie would kind of La La Land Dakota Johnson’s roll in the music industry, reinvigorate a classic singer’s career magically overnight, but the film does a really good job of upending your expectations on that front. In fact, Dakota’s hearing from anyone and everyone she meets that she needs to stay in her lane, wait her turn, and stop presuming to understand how to do the work of others. Her privilege in its many forms appears as both the millennial imposter syndrome we’ve talked about numerous times before and also in the form of Ice Cube’s singularly exquisite annoyance. Tracee Ellis Ross is effortlessly graceful, glamorous, and her comic chops on Black-ish, Reed Between the Lines, and Girlfriends allow her to let her hair down in some truly hilarious ways: my favorite gags are the ones where she off-handedly mentions being courted by Michael B Jordan and having to rebuff his affections off screen as one of her major hurdles in the first two thirds of the movie, but there are others. The way her unbelievably lazy housekeeper openly embraces her role as a remora and actively coaches Johnson on how to fly under the radar for a few years before capitalizing on the refuse of Gracie (their employer, played by Ross). Ross plays a soul singer who has hit a bit of a slump in her career as her agents and publicists attempt to let her coast into retirement in a cushy residency in Vegas. The whole plot line of Kelvin Harrison Jr.’s stage fright and anxieties about growing up in showbiz despite his talent is so juicily meta considering Ross’s own lineage from the great Diana Ross.
The original music they created for this show is catchy, which is a task in itself. Movies like Wild Rose and A Star Is Born brought some excellent energy with well-executed soundtracks and The High Note has added its own unique spin to the tradition. Kelvin Harrison Jr.’s chemistry with Johnson is electric. From their first chance meet cute in a grocery store, where he smoothly woos her with music and their subsequent interactions where he… smoothly woos her with music, their relationship throbs with the twin complexities of Johnson’s duplicity, her desire to keep things professional, and the dangling question of his need for her. This was actually the major problem I had with the movie for the first hour and change, because Harrison is by all rights a talented and independently wealthy young man with no apparent job. It’s actually a little too perfect of a setup for a romance, because it allows for Johnson to be so totally swept off her feet for this always available, roguishly good-looking bard. With only a semi-famous musician father whose fame feels to pale in comparison to Gracie’s own fictional glamor is a bit of a sticking point. So the twist of their connection is another excellent loose end tied.
The winter interlude on Catalina is a nice change of pace, full of visual humor but also musical gags as well, like the way that Johnson plays multiple covers of the same flame song during her night of DJing on her father’s behalf. The final act of the movie is more fantastical from an employer-employee perspective than anything else. I wonder how many personal assistants will watch this movie and accept some pretty unhealthy working conditions because of their firm belief in their friendship with their emotionally abusive boss. I wonder how many bosses realize how shitty they’ve been to their loyal but ineffective secretaries after a few weeks of soul-searching. Whatever the case, this movie accomplishes every form of Bechdel test you can apply to it effortlessly. It is an excellently told by director Nisha Ganatra, whose previous work on Late Night was so controversial that even years later it remains one of the few movies I have been loathe to review because of the argument Wife and I had over it. Check it out!
