Eve Hewson and Orén Kinlan in Flora and Son (TIFF)

You don’t have to have seen the trailer for Once writer/director John Carney’s latest musical film, Flora and Son, to know exactly how and where the storyline crescendos. The title character’s plucky drive, initiative, and take-no-prisoners attitude has nowhere to go but forward.

A single mother raising a surly son, Flora (Eve Hewson, daughter of U2’s Bono) lives in a Dublin council estate and gets by babysitting, or filching money from an employer’s purse. Fourteen-year-old Max (Orén Kinlan) also takes what he wants. In fact, he’s at risk. The neighborly copper pays the family a visit, warning Flora that the next time Max steals, he’ll have to go to court. He advises her to find Max “something to do.” A day late to celebrate her son’s birthday and broke, she Dumpster dives and recovers a guitar that just needs a few repairs. Recognizing the empty gesture, Max rejects the belated gift out right before slamming his bedroom door in his mom’s face.

With dreams of an American Idol–type of discovery and wanting others to like her (yes, it’s a broad motivation), Flora searches for online guitar lessons and lands on a handsome teacher, Jeff (Joseph Gordon-Levitt, in the mold of James Taylor), a laid-back former aspirant singer/songwriter in L.A.’s Topanga Canyon. She first discovers the G string—no, not that one—and proceeds to become a natural musician and singer with a slender soprano under his guidance. In a few lessons, at $20 a pop, she picks up songwriting as though it’s second nature. (The featured music is acoustic folk, courtesy of Jeff, and electronic dance, later composed by mother and son, who is into ambient music.) 

As a needed counterbalance to the inevitable uplifting moment of triumph, Flora spouts piss, spit, and vinegar, as well as raunchy talk, which gives the inspirational movie an edge—and an R rating. It falls comfortably into the feel-good category, but the jubilant climax comes with some caustic costs. Flora is no Cinderella. Her confidence increases as she learns the instrument and begins revising songs with Jeff, yet she is as hotheaded, demanding, and judgmental at the end as she is in the film’s opening when she is getting loaded at a club.

Additionally, teenager Max looks and acts his age. He just wants to be left alone. Like his mother, he doesn’t need or care for the audience’s sympathy. Nor does the film give into its built-in romantic impulses as Flora’s lessons with Jeff become more probingly personal—she asks Jeff to take off his shirt during her first lesson. At the end, Fiona weighs her personal options judiciously.

After the film’s premiere at Sundance in January, Apple TV+ bought the film for nearly $20 million, raising (perhaps unfairly) the comparison to its 2021 acquisition of CODA, another music-based family dramedy. Of the two, Flora and Son is an outlier, tougher and more pragmatic. Yet the two films go together: Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now” supplies a pivotal moment in both scenarios. However, Carney offers a bonus, footage of Mitchell singing her most famous song on a late 1960s TV show.

Flora and Son’s greatest appeal may be that it centers on collaboration between strangers, as in the case of Jeff and Flora, or between estranged family members, as with Flora and Max. They all bond over a shared interest, music, and the give and take that composing entails. With songwriting at its center, Carney’s fourth musical confection celebrates the craft and art of creation, ending in an infectious dance pop tune that will linger in your mind, whether you want it to or not.

Though it’s not an exceptional film, the script ultimately hits the right notes. Given its clipped pace and jaunty sense of humor, the movie is an easy option to stop and start at will. It debuts in theaters on September 22, and becomes an anodyne offering on Apple TV+ on September 29.