Nisha Ganatra, director of Late Night, is back with The High Note, a similarly visually sharp, female-centric film that sadly assumes merely having women in leading roles is a sufficient substitute for a script that has them do much of note.
Her follow-up feature, about a Diana Ross-type diva called Grace Davis (Tracee Ellis Ross, ABC’s “Black-ish”) and the efforts by Grace’s personal assistant/aspiring producer Maggie (Dakota Johnson) to give her a proper second act, has even less to say than Ganatra’s Mindy Kaling-penned breakthrough about a creatively blocked Letterman-like host.
Likewise involving a hardworking minority outsider attempting to make her way into the glitzy world of showbiz, The High Note’s script by debut screenwriter Flora Greeson flirts with important themes but fails to fortify them with characters and circumstances that take them beyond basic levels.
Set amid lovely Los Angeles scenery, Greeson’s tale of motivated fame-hounding is full of excessive music industry name-dropping that cheapens its message of hard work in the service of “real” music, and the story isn’t helped by the latest in Johnson’s long line of amateurish (and ironically) nepotistic performances.
Her “acting” receives little support from a fairly repulsive turn by Ross, who offers little to like about Grace — about whom next to nothing is known besides being a legend in the industry, whose rise to stardom and the secrets to her success are left assumed.
Into their bubble steps singer/songwriter David Cliff (Kelvin Harrison Jr., Luce), who croons radio-ready, cliché-rich jams but whose overt interest in Maggie from their meet-cute at an organic grocery store paints him as an aggressive pseudo-creep whose subsequent moves feel obvious and somewhat unnerving.
Stir them together with Grace’s crabby manager Jack (Ice Cube), Maggie’s DJ dad — what??? really??? — Max (Bill Pullman) and her painfully unfunny doctor housemate Kate (Zoe Chao, Where’d You Go, Bernadette), and out hops the least surprising reveal of the year in film — if not the past decade, to the point that even half-awake viewers might be surprised that another convenient detail isn’t announced.
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