Juliet, Naked (2018)

Jack and I loved this romantic comedy about Annie, fed up with her live-in boyfriend Duncan and his obsession with an elusive American (they're English) musician named Tucker Crowe, who happens to meet said musician, changing all three of their lives. Rose Byrne (last blogged for The Meddler) gives us the full range of emotions for frustrated yet hopeful Annie. I never would have suspected that she was six months pregnant while filming (I wish I had known and could have watched for the camera angles and objects said to have blocked her midsection).

Chris O'Dowd (since I wrote about him in Loving Vincent I've become a huge fan, based on season 1 of the Get Shorty series) practically steals the show as nerdy, insufferable fanboy Duncan, a college professor, and Ethan Hawke (last in Maudie) is also terrific as the balladeer who walked out of a gig decades ago leaving Duncan and fans of Duncan's Tucker Crowe website to speculate on what happened. Young Azhy Robertson (he's maybe eight years old) is adorable as Jackson, Tucker's son and Lily Brazier (in her feature debut after some English TV) is funny as Annie's madcap lesbian sister Ros.

Jesse Peretz (last helmed Our Idiot Brother) directs from a sparkling script co-written by his sister Evgenia Peretz (co-wrote Our Idiot Brother), Jim Taylor (last co-wrote Downsizing), and Tamara Jenkins (wrote and directed Slums of Beverly Hills (1998) and The Savages (2007)--she was Oscar nominated and won many awards for writing the latter), adapted from the 2009 novel by Nick Hornby (he wrote the novels on which High Fidelity (2000) and About a Boy (2002) were based). The many vinyl records in Duncan's man cave (and on the poster) made me think of High Fidelity. Judd Apatow is one of the producers, and there's a lot of humor in this, mostly, but not all, cringe-worthy.

The glorious locations in the fictitious English seaside village of Sandcliff were beautifully shot in Ramsgate and Broadstairs on the southeast coast of England, just north of Dover, by Remi Adefarasin (Oscar-nominated for Elizabeth (1998), also shot Truly Madly Deeply (1990), Sliding Doors (1998), About a Boy (2002), Match Point (2005), Scoop (2006), Elizabeth: The Golden Age (2007), Little Fockers, and more).

I could find only one track of the original music by Nathan Larson (most recently in these pages for The Skeleton Twins). Listen to it here. Apparently there's a pedophile with the same name running for congress in Virginia so I quit looking in disgust.

But the music here is focused on the character Tucker Crowe, with new original songs by Conor Oberst, Robyn Hitchcock, and Ryan Adams, many performed by Hawke. There's an album for sale with 15 tracks at the usual outlets. You can also stream 23 tracks from this page.

Rotten Tomatoes' critics, averaging 80%, are slightly less enthusiastic than its audiences at 89. We're with the audiences this time.