Nick Offerman and Kiersey Clemons in Hearts Beat Louder (Gunpowder & Sky)

Hearts Beat Loud promotes itself with a quote from a gushing film reviewer, “The Feel Good Movie We Need Right Now,” which is a pretty brazen statement to put on a movie poster. The film centers on a widowed dad (Nick Offerman) who runs a record store in Red Hook, a Brooklyn neighborhood that is populated by hipster dads who run record stores. At the beginning of summer, he goads his daughter, Sam (Kiersey Clemons), who has just graduated from high school, into cutting a tune with him. It turns out pretty good, so he uploads it onto Spotify without her permission. Then the single becomes a summer sensation. This is a cute premise, worthy of a family night at the movies, and although it may feel good, it doesn’t quite reach winning status.

Let’s examine the rest of the plot. The record store can’t handle the overhead anymore. The landlord, played by Toni Collette, has held off as long as she could on raising the rent. For how long though? Frank has leased from her for 17 years. Sam is 17 years old. Her mother died in 2006. So this single-income family has been making a go of it for the past 12 years just on the profits of an independently-owned record store way, way after the influx of MP3 players and smartphones? Take a look at the multilevel apartment the two live in. Just now Frank is being hit with financial catastrophe? In reality, this family would have been struggling much sooner than this.

Then there’s the major conflict, which is supposed to be whether Sam should take a year off of school to focus on building a band with her dad. She has a partial scholarship to go to UCLA to study premed, and Frank laments that Sam has to spend all summer in a premed class before she goes off to college to study premed for four more years. Ha! Right? But after the first five minutes, Sam is never, ever, shown in class or studying again. Instead, her entire focus turns to writing music and dating her new love interest, Rose (Sasha Lane). So maybe her scholarship would be best awarded to someone else? The premed stuff is used as a plot device but given no presence that is palpable. If Sam felt any pull toward med school, this would have been a source of good drama. Other than being brought up in conversation a time or two, the film forgets about it and stays fixed on the premise, “How cool would it be if a dad and daughter were in a band together?”

In fact, none of the characters feel like real people; they are all plot devices. In a post-screening Q&A, director Brett Haley actually said, “We wanted to make a movie about a father and daughter who wrote a song together,” which explains a lot how the slapdash screenplay was put together. It started with a premise and then had conflicts built around it. Where is the mom? Let’s have her be tragically deceased. They’re hipsters, right? Let’s exploit that by having the mom be a cyclist who was killed by a car.

All of the moments of importance are revealed in the trailer, so if you just watch that, you’ve seen all you need. I was disappointed because a few years ago Haley’s The New Year was one of my favorite Netflix finds. I have an appreciation for small, intimate stories about everyday people struggling with everyday problems. We could use more films like that right now, not this hipster-parent pandering crap.