ENTERTAINMENT Gently does it
Dandelion is wistful, wispy and fully laden with melancholy, as Ty Burr reports.
ONE WANTS TO give the benefit of the doubt to Dandelion ,a sweet, slight, impressionistic character study of a struggling musician with a luminous Kiki Layne at its centre. The second feature written and directed by Nicole Riegel (after 2020’s Holler), it’s as handmade as the personal signatures in the end credits and as beautifully brooding as a movie can be with a score and songs by Bryce and Aaron Dessner of the indie rock stalwarts The National. Does it add up to less than the sum of its parts? Certainly. But the parts are lovely enough to sustain the indulgent viewer.
Layne plays Dandelion, who when we meet her is strumming guitar and playing her delicate original songs to a restaurant bar clientele that couldn’t be less interested. The setting is Cincinnati (the actress’ own hometown, coincidentally or not), and the sense is that wherever the action is, it’s elsewhere.
Dandelion alludes to a musical circle of friends who’ve gone on to better things while she’s remained behind to care for an ailing mother (Melanie Nicholls-king), the latter pouring cold water on her daughter’s future ambitions by reminding her that “there’s nothing cute about a 40-year-old troubadour”.
After one more argument, Dandelion impulsively gets in her car and drives west to South Dakota, where a biker festival is hosting a battle of the bands. Footsore and depressed, she connects with a friendly group of folk rockers — the real band Brother Elsey, led by brothers Brady, Beau and Jack Stablein. She’s also drawn to the group’s on-and-off collaborator, a lanky Scot named Casey (Thomas Doherty of Gossip Girl and The Invitation).
And here is where Dandelion becomes a curious and intermittently successful fusion of the 2007 Irish musical romantic drama Once and a Terrence Malick movie. Casey and Dandelion meet sweet and start exchanging guitar licks and song ideas, writing lyrics on each other’s arms when they run out of paper during a hike.
Their collaborations around tent campfires, in back alleys or in impromptu jam sessions with the Stableins and friends are allowed to play out in full, and the aura of a supportive midnight community of fellow musicians is heady.
The songs are spare, rising to impassioned, with flickers of fiddle giving them body, and the Dessners’ background score is similarly charged with a sense of tender melancholy. Lauren Guiteras’ camerawork swirls through the carny atmosphere of the festival and the natural beauty of the nearby Badlands, equating love and lust with a softening of Dandelion’s career-oriented focus.
Everything seems to happen at magic hour in this movie.
The problem is that there’s just not a lot there in Dandelion. The pace is leisurely to slow, and even beautiful swooning gets tiresome after a while. Doherty gives his character shades of kindness, mystery and unreliability, and it’s never quite clear whether the heroine is naive in matters of love or just thirsty after a long drought. (That Dandelion is Black while Casey and most of the others are not is mentioned only once in passing, but it obliquely underscores her outsider status and the hot wire of anger that runs through even her quietest songs.)
Layne came to prominence as Tish in Barry Jenkins’ If Beale Street Could Talk; this is her first major lead role, and she holds the frame with a gentle insistence that at times takes a viewer’s breath away. When Dandelion is wholly inside her music — performing or composing or even idly picking out melodies — she carries her own magic hour inside her, and the refusal of the rest of the world to see it is what’s wearing her down.
Dandelion is the story of how she gets her groove back, and only the star’s gift of presence keeps it from floating off on the breeze.