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      ‘The Royal Hotel’ Review: Pulling Pints and Watching Their Backs

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      Two young women struggle to handle the obstreperous patrons of a remote Australian pub in this coolly calibrated thriller.We are barely 12 minutes into Kitty Green’s “The Royal Hotel” before the first C-word is dropped, but it isn’t gratuitous. The film’s language, dominated by the braying of obnoxious, bellies-to-the-bar boozehounds, is both spice and thickening agent in its pervasive mood of clammy menace. Our reward for enduring this relentless churn of apprehension is not the one we anticipate.Teasing expectations — to some viewers’ ultimate disappointment, no doubt — is much of what this keenly calibrated thriller is about, the familiarity of its setup raising our most bloodthirsty horror-movie hopes. Place two young, attractive female backpackers in a forlorn mining town somewhere in the Australian Outback; surround them with sex-starved, boorish miners; allow them no access to cell service or reliable transport. Their ensuing trials are a cyst that Green and her co-writer, Oscar Redding, take their sweet time to lance.Until then, we must gnaw our fingernails as Hanna and Liv (Julia Garner and Jessica Henwick, both terrific) refresh their finances by working as live-in bartenders in the titular establishment. The hotel’s dilapidation — to say nothing of its grubby, grabby, mostly male clientele — is a far cry from the yacht parties the women were recently enjoying in Sydney. The bar owner (an indispensable Hugo Weaving) is a raging alcoholic, yet his girlfriend (Ursula Yovich) seems kind and possibly protective. And while one regular (Daniel Henshall) is frankly terrifying, another (Toby Wallace) is so clean and cute that his off-color humor is easier to ignore. At what point should the women feel alarmed enough to leave?That question haunts every frame of a movie that persistently taunts us with the likelihood of male violence, its blasted landscapes and aura of desolation pumped relentlessly by Michael Latham’s brooding cinematography. Green, in her second collaboration with Garner (after the similarly themed — if significantly less raucous — “The Assistant” in 2020), is proving a cool chronicler of workplace abuse and the kind of harassment that disguises itself as harmless fun. Sometimes a woman’s only defense is to trust the pricking skin and spasming gut that warns her otherwise.Inspired by Pete Gleeson’s 2016 documentary about two Finnish backpackers, “Hotel Coolgardie,” “The Royal Hotel” is after something more subtle than pure horror. In its destabilizing presentation of men whose motivations appear to shift from scene to scene — the women’s fun-loving English predecessors seem genuinely sorry to leave — it places the audience on a knife edge. This, along with the general drunkenness and the bar’s oppressive gloom, can be exhausting; but Green, filming for the first time in her native Australia, displays such a sure hand with the movie’s tone that even her brief slips into genre cliché (like a surprise snake and a convenient storm) inflict minimal damage. Her overtly feminist climax, though, feels more problematic, a betrayal of the movie’s carefully drawn ambiguities and concern for its more vulnerable characters. Hanna and Liv were never looking for a fight; all they really wanted was to see some kangaroos.The Royal HotelRated R for female skin and men with a skinful. Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘More Than Ever’ Review: A Shared Melancholy

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      This middlebrow weepie about a woman dying from a rare lung disease stars Vicky Krieps and Gaspard Ulliel in his final role before his death in 2022.Since her star-making turn in “Phantom Thread,” the Luxembourgish actress Vicky Krieps has found fertile work, particularly in European productions, playing women responding to tragedy, sometimes with recklessness or self-harm.“More Than Ever,” a solid (mostly) French-language weepie, follows suit, with Krieps playing as Hélène, a 30-something married woman suffering from a rare and debilitating lung disease. Directed by Emily Atif, this middlebrow drama showcases Krieps’s captivating blend of melancholic fragility and spiky tenacity, riding on the strength of its performers, including the Gaspard Ulliel in his final live-action role before his accidental death in 2022.Ulliel plays Hélène’s loyal hubbie, Matthieu, whom we first see applying mascara to his feeble wife before a social outing. Their pals tiptoe awkwardly around the knowledge of Hélène’s health, triggering a minor meltdown by Hélène that also sketches out the tensions that inform the rest of the film.Matthieu refuses to give up hope while Hélène inches toward an acceptance of her fate that requires her to reframe her life. This means untethering herself from the past, her spouse included. This understanding comes courtesy of an “Eat Pray Love” style excursion to rural Norway, where Hélène bunks with a friend she met on the internet, Bent (Bjorn Floberg), a blogger with terminal cancer, a dark sense of humor and an idyllic property at the edge of a lake.Krieps and Ulliel give weight and texture to the couple’s push and pull. Guilt and grief intermingle, but no single feeling stands up to the brute fact of Hélène’s physical deterioration, made stark against an impassive backdrop of crystal waters and shivering woodlands. If her past films haven’t already made this clear, this is one of Krieps’s trademarks: transcendence through willful obliteration.More Than EverNot rated. In French, English and Norwegian, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 3 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘My Love Affair With Marriage’ Review: A Tale of Love and Loss

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      This animated musical about a young woman’s sexual and romantic awakening uses a gloriously tactile aesthetic.“You’re not a complete person without your soul mate,” croon three mythical birdlike women early in the coming-of-age musical “My Love Affair With Marriage.” The vocal trio — who fall somewhere between a Greek chorus and the “Macbeth” weird sisters — are among countless whimsical devices that elevate this beguiling animated feature, which traces the sexual and romantic awakening of a young woman in the Soviet Union.Written and directed with wild imagination by the Latvian filmmaker Signe Baumane (“Rocks in My Pockets”), the film follows Zelma (voiced by Dagmara Dominczyk) over 23 years as she transforms from spunky kid to lovelorn teenager to restless wife to realized artist — all while entangled in a double helix of fallacies about female worth and feminine purpose. Alternating between sass and sincerity, Baumane methodically identifies the origins of these myths and then traces how they pinball Zelma through a series of agonies and ecstasies.It’s a moody, unpredictable tale of love and loss, stuffed with vivid metaphors, Soviet period detail and pedagogical sequences about the physiology of love. The glue holding these disparate pieces together is the film’s gloriously tactile aesthetic: Baumane crafted Zelma’s world by overlaying line-drawn characters on meticulously constructed papier-mâché dioramas. The result evokes an adult puppet show crossed with a graphic novel, and like the budding female identity the film untangles, the whole thing takes a little time getting used to. Once you do, it is remarkably beautiful.My Love Affair With MarriageNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 47 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Foe’ Review: The Space Between

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      Saoirse Ronan and Paul Mescal play a farm couple with a less-than-idyllic marriage in the Midwest of the future.Set in a future when devastation of the environment has humanity turning to outer space as a homestead, “Foe” presents a spectacle of futility. Not the climate change disaster itself, which is tangential to the plot, but the sight of great actors throwing themselves into this material, as if they were slogging through a Tennessee Williams marathon instead of the equivalent of a distended “Twilight Zone” episode with an aesthetic that might be described as “Dorothea Lange filter.”The actual source is a 2018 novel by Iain Reid, who wrote the screenplay with the director, Garth Davis (“Lion”). The subject isn’t the dystopia, but a marriage. One night in the year 2065, Junior (Paul Mescal) and Hen (Saoirse Ronan), who live on a farm in the Midwest (played by Australia), are approached by a car with “Blade Runner” headlights. The driver is Terrance (Aaron Pierre), who brings news he insists should be seen as positive. (Pierre does not have a role that calls for the consuming physicality of Mescal’s and Ronan’s, but he does have a sly way of asking for a glass of water — a scarce resource — so the request sounds vaguely like a threat.)Junior has been selected as a candidate for off-world colonization. Nothing will happen just yet, the couple are promised, but of course — to skip ahead to Terrance’s second visit, a year later — something does. Junior’s advancement to the next round means that Terrance will need to move in with them, to probe Junior like a lab rat. Also, don’t worry! While Junior is away, Hen will live with a biological replacement — a replica that has living tissue and Junior’s memories. It’s the high-tech equivalent of leaving a war wife with a photograph, Terrance explains, except that this photograph can live and breathe. All to help their marriage survive, naturally.The proposal gets a bad laugh, perhaps not entirely intended. Junior doesn’t like the idea of Hen cohabitating with a fleshy facsimile, and he suspects that Terrance is trying to drive a wedge between them. But partly because the narrative reveals information piecemeal, the marriage can only be defined in generic, broadly symbolic terms. (The two wed straight out of school; Junior resents when Hen plays the piano.)To their great credit, the Irish stars, often loosely clothed and soaked in sweat from the lack of air conditioning, have such presence and chemistry that it’s possible to believe in their intimacy — the pull and tangle of their bodies, their paroxysms of anguish — and even to pretend in the moment that they have full-fledged characters to play.Drawn to magic-hour vistas and pseudo-poetic shots of ripped greenhouse plastic blowing in the wind, “Foe” looks as if it’s been bronzed. (The cinematographer Matyas Erdely, of Laszlo Nemes’s “Son of Saul” and “Sunset,” works wonders with natural light.) But the cryptic, allusive mode is at odds with the film’s efforts to psychoanalyze a marriage. The archetypal characters of Terrence Malick’s “Days of Heaven” — almost certainly a visual influence — merely had to suggest back story. Here, Hen and Junior’s glanced-at history is asked to carry weight the sketchy outlines cannot bear.The hollowness turns out to be a feature, not a bug, and a completely unnecessary final beat dispels any troubling ambiguities that might have lingered. What begins as a sleek, science-fiction-tinged mystery leaves little more than a cloud of dust.FoeRated R. Spousal estrangement. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. In theaters. More

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      A Spike Lee Joint via Movie Posters and Sports Jerseys

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      Lee, the director of “Do the Right Thing” and “Malcolm X,” donated more than 400 items for a Brooklyn Museum exhibition.The first image to catch your eye in the Brooklyn Museum’s new exhibition about the director Spike Lee could be a wall projection of “Malcolm X,” the 1992 movie staring Denzel Washington. Nearby hang artworks of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Trayvon Martin, whose killing inspired the Black Lives Matter Movement.Elsewhere, a sign from the segregation era reads “Colored Waiting Room.”The Black History and Culture section is a jarring opening to an exhibition that guides visitors through themes, concepts and objects that inspired Lee, 66, as he became a defining figure in the Black community. He donated more than 400 items for the show, “Spike Lee: Creative Sources,” which opens on Saturday and runs through Feb. 4, 2024.Lee’s “Malcolm X,” from 1992, starred Denzel Washington. Amir Hamja/The New York Times“You don’t have to really be an art aficionado to appreciate so much of this exhibition, because Spike is not only one of those but he’s a bibliophile, he’s a sports fan, he’s a lover of history,” Kimberli Gant, the exhibition’s curator, said.Lee has been nominated for five Academy Awards, winning the best adapted screenplay Oscar for “BlacKkKlansman” (2018). In addition to his popular films — he labels them “joints” — such as “Do the Right Thing” and “Inside Man,” Lee has become a staple in the courtside seats at Madison Square Garden for New York Knicks games.At the Brooklyn Museum, walls splashed in eye-popping bold colors contrast with the wood accents and paneling that turn gallery spaces into what resembles a movie set. Visitors can walk through seven sections divided into categories such as music and sports that Gant said she hoped would appeal to a broad group of people.“I don’t want this show to be so heavy that you’re leaving depressed,” Gant said. “There’s a lot of heavy material, but there’s joy here, too.”New YorkA Brooklyn section of the exhibition includes the Dodgers jersey that Lee wore as the character Mookie in “Do the Right Thing.”Amir Hamja/The New York TimesAn 8-year-old Lee on the cover of New York magazine.Amir Hamja/The New York TimesLee, who was born in Atlanta but raised in Brooklyn, has set many of his movies in New York’s boroughs. One section of the exhibition features news articles about Lee in The Daily News and The New York Times, as well as a photograph of him as a child on the cover of New York magazine.The room emphasizes “Do the Right Thing,” the 1989 film that examines racial tension between Black people and Italian Americans in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood. Memorabilia from the movie, which was nominated for two Academy Awards and has been preserved by the National Film Registry, includes the Brooklyn Dodgers jersey that Lee wore as the character Mookie.MoviesThe exhibition’s walls are splashed in eye-popping bold colors.Amir Hamja/The New York TimesLee has an Oscar for best adapted screenplay, for “BlacKkKlansman,” as well as a lifetime achievement award.Amir Hamja/The New York TimesLarge film posters greet visitors in the section dedicated to movies and cinema, where Lee’s Oscar trophy for “BlacKkKlansman,” as well as the honorary one he received in 2015 for lifetime achievement, can be found in a glass case mounted on the wall.Also on display are gifts from other celebrities, including signed posters by the “Jurassic Park” director Steven Spielberg and the “Boyz N the Hood” director John Singleton. An adjacent room focused on photography has a letter written by former President Barack Obama.SportsOne room is devoted to New York Knicks memorabilia, including a net from the 1970 N.B.A. finals, when the team won its first title.Amir Hamja/The New York TimesMichael Jordan autographed a pair of sneakers he wore during the “flu game” in the 1997 N.B.A. finals. Amir Hamja/The New York TimesThe largest section in “Spike Lee: Creative Sources” is reserved for sports, with a small room solely for Knicks memorabilia. Those souvenirs include a jersey signed by Carmelo Anthony and a net from the 1970 N.B.A. finals, when the Knicks won their first title by defeating the Los Angeles Lakers in seven games.A larger room holds autographed items from LeBron James, Serena Williams, Jim Brown and Michael Jordan, as well as news articles signed by Stephen Curry after he broke the N.B.A. record for most career 3-pointers, a 2021 game that Lee attended at the Garden.Aligning with the social justice theme of the exhibition’s entrance, large portions are dedicated to Jackie Robinson, the first Black player in Major League Baseball, and the boxer and activist Muhammad Ali. Near the exit is a signed jersey of Colin Kaepernick, the quarterback who in 2016 ignited a fierce debate on athletes’ rights to protest by kneeling during the national anthem. More

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      The Best Movies and TV Shows Coming to Netflix in October

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      “Lupin” returns and the latest literary horror adaptation from Mike Flanagan debuts, just in time for Halloween.Every month, Netflix adds movies and TV shows to its library. Here are our picks for some of October’s most promising new titles. (Note: Streaming services occasionally change schedules without giving notice. For more recommendations on what to stream, sign up for our Watching newsletter here.)‘The Return of Tanya Tucker: Featuring Brandi Carlile’Started streaming: Oct. 1The country music singer Tanya Tucker was still a teenager when she recorded her first hit songs in the early 1970s; and hitting the top of the charts at a young age soon led to problems like substance abuse, bad relationships and stage fright. The director Kathlyn Horan’s documentary “The Return of Tanya Tucker: Featuring Brandi Carlile” uses the recording and release of a 2019 Tucker comeback album — spearheaded by the modern alt-country stars Carlile and Shooter Jennings — as the frame for a more comprehensive look at the musician’s tumultuous life. This is a touching movie about an artist trying to find her voice and purpose again, helped by two famous fans who sometimes struggle to convince Tucker that they know what they are doing.‘Lupin’ Part 3Starts streaming: Oct. 5After a long layoff, the hit French adventure series “Lupin” is back for seven more episodes of high-stakes heists and sly social commentary. Omar Sy returns as Assane Diop, who has turned his disgust with the rich and powerful — and his love of the author Maurice Leblanc’s gentleman thief character Arsène Lupin — into a lucrative career as a criminal mastermind. The show’s twisty plotting jumps between thrilling caper sequences and scenes that explore Assane’s past as the son of a Senegalese immigrant. The previous set of episodes ended with the hero achieving one of his major goals: exacting revenge on his family’s greatest enemy. The new set begins with Assane on the run and plotting his next moves — which are complicated by his becoming something of a national folk hero.‘Fair Play’Starts streaming: Oct. 6This edgy business-world drama was a sensation at Sundance earlier this year, stirring up audiences with its story of two ambitious young hedge fund analysts — Emily (Phoebe Dynevor from “Bridgerton”) and Luke (Alden Ehrenreich from “Solo”) — whose passionate secret love affair starts going sour after Emily is promoted into a supervisory position at their firm. The writer-director Chloe Domont worked previously on “Billions” and “Ballers,” two TV series that examine how money and power complicate interpersonal relationships. With “Fair Play,” Domont also factors in gender roles, as the couple is pulled apart by the demands of an industry that values macho swagger. The film has the rhythm of a thriller, anchored by the question of whether Emily and Luke’s romance and careers can survive her sudden success.‘The Fall of the House of Usher’Starts streaming: Oct. 12The third of the writer-director Mike Flanagan’s literary horror mini-series for Netflix (after “The Haunting of Hill House” and “The Haunting of Bly Manor”) uses the Edgar Allan Poe short story “The Fall of the House of Usher” as a jumping-off point for a social satire with gothic overtones. Bruce Greenwood plays Roderick Usher, the patriarch of a large and wealthy family that has made much of its fortune peddling dangerous pharmaceuticals. When all of his grown children begin dying, Roderick tells the crusading attorney C. Auguste Dupin (Carl Lumbly) the story of his tragedy scarred, supernaturally plagued life. Flanagan and his writers borrow names and ideas from other Poe books; but they have set their saga and its thematic concerns in the modern day, with a stellar cast that also includes Mark Hamill, Carla Gugino, Mary McDonnell and Henry Thomas.‘Pain Hustlers’Starts streaming: Oct. 27Emily Blunt and Chris Evans play persuasive pharmaceutical salespeople in the drama “Pain Hustlers,” the latest in a recent string of films and TV series that dig into the roots of America’s opioid crisis. The movie is directed by David Yates, who has spent much of the past 15 years at the helm of the Harry Potter movie franchise; and it was scripted by Wells Tower, who has won acclaim as an author of short fiction. These two adapt Evan Hughes’s nonfiction book of the same name, turning it into a fast-paced and fact-filled big business exposé. It is similar to the likes of “The Wolf of Wall Street” and “The Big Short” in the way it uses documentary-style interludes and charismatic antiheroes to tell the story of how greed and lax ethics played a role in the systemic overprescribing of painkillers.Also arriving:Oct. 4“Beckham”“Race to the Summit”Oct. 5“Everything Now” Season 1Oct. 6“Ballerina”“A Deadly Invitation”Oct. 10“Last One Standing” Season 2Oct. 11“Big Vape: The Rise and Fall of Juul”“Once Upon a Star”“Pact of Silence” Season 1Oct. 12“Good Night World” Season 1Oct. 13“The Conference”Oct. 17“The Devil on Trial”Oct. 19“Bodies”“Crypto Boy”“Neon” Season 1Oct. 20“Creature”“Doona!”“Elite” Season 7“Old Dads”“Surviving Paradise”“Vjeran Tomic: The Spider-Man of Paris”Oct. 25“Life on Our Planet” Season 1Oct. 26“Pluto” Season 1Oct. 27“Sister Death”“Tore”“Yellow Door: ’90s Lo-Fi Film Club” More

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      Introducing Nathan Lane, the Hip New Face of A24

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      When you’re pondering actors associated with the indie-film company A24, your thoughts may run to the young, hot and impossibly tousled.In years past, this stable of dewy ingénues has included the likes of Robert Pattinson (“Good Time,” “The Lighthouse”), Riley Keough (“American Honey,” “Zola”) and Lucas Hedges (“Lady Bird,” “Waves”). But it’s time to make way for the studio’s newest muse, a three-time Tony winner whose key roles this year in a pair of A24 films — Ari Aster’s trippy “Beau Is Afraid” and the gleefully silly “Dicks: The Musical” (opening Friday) — offer the delightful opportunity to turn to your cool nephew and exclaim, “Oh, he’s in this?”Rest assured, the he in question is just as surprised. “I’m now the poster boy for A24,” said Nathan Lane, 67, over a recent morning coffee date in Los Angeles. “Who would have guessed?”One of Broadway’s most beloved actors, Lane had his breakout moment on the big screen in 1990s studio fare like “The Lion King” and “The Birdcage,” which mined his musical-theater talents and expansive comic sensibility for all they were worth. But though Lane has worked continually in the theater and on TV ever since, the film industry hasn’t always known what to do with him, which makes his current renaissance all the sweeter: He was the first choice for his roles in both of those A24 envelope-pushers, even though they’re utterly unlike anything he’s done before.Take “Beau Is Afraid,” released in April, a three-hour mind-bender about filial anxiety that had Lane come in for a midmovie face-off with an intense Joaquin Phoenix. (SAG-AFTRA strike rules prohibit Lane from talking about it, but the guild gave him a waiver for the new film.) Or sample “Dicks,” a proudly filthy queer musical that asks Lane to spit deli meat at puppets and ensures that for the rest of his life, he will share an IMDb page with the rapper Megan Thee Stallion.“Don’t you love show business, when these things can happen to a little boy from Jersey City?” Lane quipped.Lane’s co-star Aaron Jackson said, “Now that people like us are coming of age and getting to write stuff, it’s like, what about casting one of the most brilliant actors we’ve ever had?”Erik Tanner for The New York TimesThe Lane-aissance could either be a feat of timing or the beginning of a trend. But it’s also a reminder, not long after Michelle Yeoh found Oscar-winning acclaim in A24’s “Everything Everywhere All At Once,” that the studio’s coolness can come from more than the minting of new stars: It can be just as rewarding to pluck well-known veterans and toss them into a world that’s unexpected and wild.“To me, he’s the foundation,” said Aaron Jackson, who co-wrote and co-stars in Lane’s new film musical with his comedy partner, Josh Sharp. As a child, Jackson would do an impression of Lane as the “Lion King” meerkat Timon to make his grandfather laugh; when he was older, he got a DVD of Lane in a filmed version of the 2000 play “The Man Who Came to Dinner” and watched it on a near loop. “Now that people like us are coming of age and getting to write stuff, it’s like, what about casting one of the most brilliant actors we’ve ever had?”Though Jackson, Sharp and the director Larry Charles were eager to get Lane into their movie, the actor wasn’t initially sure what to make of the project. A hard-R spin on “The Parent Trap” that Jackson and Sharp based on a play they used to perform in the basement of a Gristedes, their film casts the New York comedians as long-lost twins who conspire to reunite their daffy parents. Hayley Mills never had it so hard, though: Here, dear old Mom (Megan Mullally) is an eccentric shut-in with a detached vagina, while Dad (Lane) is a newly out bon vivant who’s uncomfortably devoted to the two disgusting sewer creatures he keeps caged in his living room.“When I read it, I said to my agent and manager, ‘Are you serious with this?’” Lane recalled. The script had made him laugh, but he worried the comic situations were too outrageous, even for him. To assuage his fears, Lane met Sharp and Jackson at an Indian restaurant near his house, where their comic sensibilities clicked and cosmopolitans were served until the house lights came on.“It went on for four hours, and I fell in love with them and wanted to adopt them,” said Lane, who was ultimately won over by the eagerness of Jackson and Sharp to fly in the face of decorum at a time when “Don’t Say Gay” bills were being written into law. “We’re going to say whatever we want,” Lane said, channeling the duo’s brio. “And you’ll have to live with it.”Still, it’s one thing to read those out-there scenes and quite another to actually perform them, as Lane found when he showed up on set. Many of his big moments revolve around those unnerving sewer creatures, a pair of diapered reptilians that his character dotes on like an attentive mama bird. (Hence the regurgitated deli meats.) Though the filmmakers considered hiring Cirque du Soleil gymnasts to play the sewer boys, they ultimately settled on two puppets, which may be an even creepier touch.Lane, left, with Joaquin Phoenix and Amy Ryan in “Beau Is Afraid.”Takashi Seida/A24Lane with, clockwise from top right, Josh Sharp, Aaron Jackson and Megan Mullally in the new film. “When I read it, I said to my agent and manager, ‘Are you serious with this?’” Lane said.Justin Lubin/A24“I’m not crazy about puppets — I’ve worked with them in the past, it’s nothing but trouble,” Lane said, adding under his breath, “I’ll be getting hostile letters from Basil Twist.” In order to play the scenes with true affection despite the twisted context, Lane endeavored to think about the sewer creatures as though they were his character’s pet corgis.“It has to be very grounded and it has to be subtle,” Lane explained, “even when you’re spitting cold cuts at two ugly puppets in a cage.”The closing-credits blooper reel suggests that was a tough task: In more than a few blown takes, Lane wonders aloud how the hell he ended up in such a surreal situation. (Asked by the director to spit more deli meats into the puppets’ mouths, Lane playfully pronounces it the worst of “all the humiliations I’ve experienced in my years of show business, and they are legion.”) Even during our coffee, Lane was unable to describe an emotional clinch with the sewer creatures without bursting into laughter.“You can’t even explain it!” he said. “I was crying and holding these puppets and kissing them goodbye, thinking, I can’t believe this is happening.”Sharp praised Lane’s ability to still dial into those scenes and commit to something real. “There’s two or three sneaky little heart moments in the movie and Nathan drives all of them,” he said. “He’s a fabulous actor.”Lane just hopes people will notice. “I mean, this may have killed it,” he joked, “but if it led to other things in film, interesting stuff, that would be great.” A more robust movie career is something Lane wants but has always been wary of: Wouldn’t you feel skittish if you gave one of the most finely calibrated comic performances of the ’90s in “The Birdcage” and the only two film scripts you received afterward were for “Mouse Hunt” and “Mr. Magoo”?Though Lane felt the stage could offer him a more expansive suite of roles, including his most famous part, as Max Bialystock in “The Producers,” even there, the appearance of typecasting could make him bristle. In 2010, while playing Gomez Addams in a Broadway musical version of “The Addams Family,” Lane read an article in this paper by Charles Isherwood that deemed him the greatest entertainer to appear on Broadway over the past decade. While it was meant as high praise, the description rankled him.“Amy Sedaris likes to call herself an entertainer, but for some reason it really bothered me,” Lane said. “It’s not like I spent 48 years in Ringling Bros. — I had done plenty of plays, the work of Terrence McNally or Jon Robin Baitz or Simon Gray. I felt like I had shown a lot of different colors along the way, but you become known for a handful of things.”Determined to shake things up, Lane emailed his friend, the actor Brian Dennehy, who was mulling a new adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s “The Iceman Cometh.” Though that shattering drama wasn’t the sort of production he would immediately come to mind for, Lane pitched himself for the tricky role of Hickey, the salesman who forces his fellow bar mates to confront dreams long deferred.Despite acclaimed performances in the ’90s in “The Birdcage” and “The Lion King,” Lane had trouble getting traction in Hollywood films.Erik Tanner for The New York TimesDennehy was intrigued, and the two men signed on for a production that played at BAM in 2015. “It changed the way I approach everything now,” Lane said. “I wanted to be scared again. I wanted to think, I don’t know if I can do this.” From Isherwood, Lane earned a “lusty bravo,” though the review that mattered most was the kind one he received from Dennehy, who died in 2020. “He was a very loving and supportive mentor, and I miss him very much,” Lane said, tearing up.He hopes more roles akin to Hickey are in his theatrical future, though he noted, “I don’t think they would be handing me that part in a film.” So why is it that Lane can be widely recognized as an unparalleled multitalent and yet good movie offers can be so hard to come by? I asked his new co-star Jackson, who replied with a mordant chuckle.“Well, Hollywood does hate gay people, even still,” he said. “I mean, they pretend that they don’t, but they do.”Still, he hoped that Lane’s A24 hot streak indicates that a younger generation of people, raised on Lane’s performances, have more exciting ideas of what do with him than the old guard Lane initially encountered: “He’s so good at acting that now they’re like, ‘Maybe we should let a gay person be a star.’”In the meantime, there’s “Dicks.” “Our little baby is going out to the real world where people can’t wait to be offended,” Lane said. “When I saw it, I just said, ‘Well, either it’s going to be this cult hit, or we’ll all be deported.’”Though he isn’t sure how the film will be received — “I’d like to show this to Mitch McConnell, then he’d really freeze” — Lane still offered some marketing suggestions. He told Sharp and Jackson they should record a video to warn that watching the film in a theater could make the audience gay, then ask a few willing football players to serve as the guinea pigs: “You send in Aaron Rodgers and a couple of others, and then they come out of there in caftans.”The idea was vetoed when they heard that the recent comedy “Bottoms” might also be planning a turn-you-gay marketing angle, but Lane was just happy to have the company. “If you can get away with ‘Bottoms’ — if you can have a high-school comedy about teenage lesbians starting a fight club — you certainly can have ‘Dicks: The Musical,’” he said.With that remark, our coffee date was over. And though we had met in the early morning, at an hour when some party-hearty A24 stars might finally be crawling into bed, Lane assured me it was no trouble at all.“This was like therapy,” he said. “I cried, I laughed, I talked about ‘Dicks.’” More

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      in Music

      ‘Flora and Son’ and the Unspoken Truth About Songwriting

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      To one musician, John Carney’s films about budding artists mirror the joys and pitfalls of crafting tunes.The revered record producer Rick Rubin once asked me if I was ready for a change. My band Thursday was coming off our third album, “War All the Time.” We had just cracked the Top 10 on the Billboard album chart by producing anthems for the very same post-hardcore genre that we had helped to shape, but Rubin was clear: The creative clock was already ticking. At a certain point, staying the same meant fading away.With “Flora and Son” (streaming on Apple TV+), the writer-director John Carney arrives at a similar question. His scrappy debut, “Once” (2007), had been an unexpected sleeper hit: a no-budget, boy-loses-girl story familiar to every musician who’s ever picked up a guitar to try to win someone back. His second, “Begin Again” (2014), was a disappointing sophomore slump at the hands of the Hollywood movie machine, a situation that songwriters face at the hands of the major label machine. Think U2’s “October” or Bad Religion’s “Into the Unknown.” Where “Once” trusted the audience, “Begin Again” spoke every subtext aloud. Was the success of “Once” beginner’s luck or simply sparks cast off by one of its leads, Glen Hansard, Carney’s longtime bandmate in the Frames?A critical success, “Sing Street” (2016) answered one question by posing another: yes, Carney could successfully make movies about lovelorn boys with guitars, but was that all he was capable of? Would his next film be a total reinvention, or would the song remain the same? When Rick Rubin posed that similar question to me, I told him that I wanted our next record to be “less real and more true.” Indeed, much to the dismay of our audience, we abandoned our own realism and shot to the moon with “A City by the Light Divided,” produced by Dave Fridmann.Carney, for his part, wisely chooses to edit weakness and lean into strength with “Flora and Son,” delivering characters both real and true. Each has their own music motivations. Ian (Jack Reynor), Flora’s arrogant ex, sees musical stardom as a means to put his own interests above everyone around him. Even though his own quest for fame has been stunted, his faith is as bright as the image in the mirror. Flora’s son, Max (played by the relative newcomer Oren Kinlan), is a quick study. Watching more popular classmates get the attention of his crush through their YouTube rap videos, Max teaches himself GarageBand. Carney knows that we start on our own musical paths for external reasons — get the girl, make the money, tell the ex to shove it — but he also understands that the ones who stay with music must eventually find its home within our souls. Flora’s guitar teacher, Jeff (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), has internalized music as a sacred spiritual path, and Gordon-Levitt fills him with both the generosity of a devotee and the quiet pretension of a prematurely enlightened monk.Having produced several bands’ first albums, I hear enough of my own voice in Gordon-Levitt’s well, actuallys to want to pick up the phone and apologize for all the bad advice I’ve ever given (like telling My Chemical Romance that its breakout single, “I’m Not Okay,” was too pop). Still, Jeff is likable enough and provides contrast with Ian. Both men see themselves as has-beens, but Gordon-Levitt gives Jeff a hint of humility and a willingness to listen that separates him from Ian’s showy obstinance, suggesting that maybe we only become failed musicians once we stop learning to grow.Marketa Irglova and Glen Hansard in “Once,” Carney’s initial hit.Searchlight PicturesCarney, too, has been willing to grow. After drawing fire for the lack of three-dimensional female characters in his movies (even when they are the leads), Eve Hewson’s Flora is a character for the ages. Within her first 10 minutes onscreen, she forgets her son’s birthday, hits on another woman’s boyfriend and alienates the one sympathetic friend in her orbit. She’s petty, selfish and entirely magnetic. Being the daughter of U2’s Bono — a heritage from which she takes none of the musicality and 110 percent of the rock star strut — Hewson is in the perfect position to point out musicians’ many absurdities, an eye roll at a time. I imagine she’s had good practice. So how does a cynical character like Flora find herself putting faith in music? For the most fundamental reason: What else does she have to believe in?Neither wholly good or bad, Flora is something better. She’s interesting, far too interesting to be stuck in a film whose whole plot hinges on the premise that an acoustic guitar found in a dumpster could change the lives of both a mother and child. So it’s a giant relief, at least, to watch Max dismiss the guitar out of hand. Later Flora, in a bout of drunken curiosity, scours YouTube to try to learn the instrument herself.Pitch is not a native language and the learning curve can be steep. I was worried that Carney and his songwriting partner, Gary Clark, would aim their songs at the wide open Irish sky as they did with “Sing Street,” but for Flora, they keep the songs as small as the escape key on her laptop. I never get the sense that Flora, a single mother with a bad attitude and a washed-up guitar teacher, is about to accidentally write “Hey Jude.” Instead, in a beautiful turn, Jeff shows an unimpressed Flora his own songs and she gives an unvarnished critique: The chorus is wrong, she tells him, and suggests alternate notes, better phrasing.Carney taps into a truth that most songwriters never pay heed to: Learn too much about music and you forget where the magic is. It’s in the listening, after all, not the playing; the singing of the chorus, not the turn of phrase on the notebook page. It’s easy to forget that a professional is one who does something for money, while an amateur is one who does that same thing for love. Flora never rises above amateur status as a singer, a mother, or even a friend. For all its fairy-tale golden guitar premise, “Flora and Son” delivers a message that’s much closer to the ground: We should all be so lucky as to remain amateurs in our own lives. More