What if your ex started dating your favorite musician? That’s the neurotic paranoid fantasy at the heart of Juliet, Naked, adapted, naturally, from a Nick Hornby novel. But if this midlife crisis seems in principle like so much privileged navel-gazing, Ethan Hawke’s central performance as the rock star who’s trying to grow up makes the bad boy character relatable and even forgivable.
Duncan (Chris O’Dowd) is a drip. A college professor in a seaside town in England, he runs the fan page for Tucker Crowe, an indie singer-songwriter whose last album, Juliet, was released over 20 years ago. Duncan opens the movie with his latest video exegesis of his idol, fueled by in-depth knowledge and not a little smugness, ruminating over the same scraps of music for the umpteenth time. You see, Crowe has since dropped out of sight, leading to unending speculation from super fans and a lot of eye-rolling from Annie (Rose Byrne), Duncan’s live-in girlfriend. The curator of a small museum, she’s been with Duncan for 15 years but has always felt like she takes the back burner to his musical obsession.
One day Annie intercepts a mysterious package meant for Duncan that includes acoustic demos for Juliet (hence the movie’s title). She listens, intrigued but still skeptical, and then proceeds to write a candid, negative review of these unearthed recordings on Duncan’s fan page. Soon she gets an appreciative email from none other than Tucker Crowe (Hawke).
While Duncan meets a new woman more tolerant of his fandom, Annie strikes up a cross-Atlantic epistolary relationship with Tucker, who is quite clear about his flaws as a human being and itinerant parent who has fathered several children by different mothers. He knows he’s screwed up and would love to make it up to his kids—some of whom don’t even know they have siblings. To that end, he plans to fly to London to meet his new grandkid—would Annie like to meet up?
The men of Juliet, Naked seem like they’ve been dragged reluctantly into adulthood out of Hornby’s novel High Fidelity, and if Duncan hasn’t quite made his peace with the world outside his record collection, and Tucker is belatedly (if imperfectly) facing responsibility, Annie grounds the men even though she perhaps blindly careens from one form of arrested adolescent boy to another. O’Dowd is a mere cartoon character, albeit a recognizable one, but it’s Byrne and Hawke who create real people out of their literary characters. Director Jesse Peretz (Our Idiot Brother) doesn’t skimp on the domestic complications that Tucker has created for himself, but without justifying bad behavior, Hawke makes his character’s attempts at redemption believable. Likewise, even if you may question Byrne’s sanity at falling for someone with Tucker’s track record, their chemistry is clearly more genuine with the fallen rock star than with the basement fanboy.
Hawke performs his sensitive singer-songwriter lyrics with a little tongue-in-cheek, but it’s his faltering Kinks cover that really sings. Juliet, Naked would seem to be the latest chapter in a series of rom-com bad relationship choices, but its leads are winning enough to make you want these two lost souls to get together. Even Tucker would admit that its modest charms deliver better art than his own music.
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