‘Juliet, Naked’ Will Make You Want to Move to England and Sleep with a Rock Star

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MOVIE: Juliet, Naked
DIRECTOR: Jesse Peretz
CAST: Rose Byrne, Ethan Hawke, Chris O’Dowd
AVAILABLE ON: Prime Video and iTunes

Author and screenwriter Nick Hornby feels like he’s been gravitating to something like Juliet, Naked for his whole career. His previous books-to-movies have included High Fidelity, where a record-store proprietor mourns his romantic failings amid a life obsessed with mixtapes and playlists and conflating music taste with self-worth, and About a Boy, whose movie version excised a lot of the original’s time-specific material about the death of Kurt Cobain but still tells the story of a feckless bachelor with too much time and money on his hands.

With Juliet, Naked, brought to the screen by director Jesse Peretz (Our Idiot Brother) and screenwriters as notable as Tamara Jenkins (The Savages; the recent Private Life), Jim Taylor (Sideways), and Phil Alden Robinson (Field of Dreams), the classic Hornby notions are all there. Chris O’Dowd plays a man who’s probably too old to be as obsessive about his favorite music as he is, but there you have it. He plays Duncan, who’s been obsessed with the music of the now-reclusive Tucker Crowe (Ethan Hawke) his whole life, to the increasingly apparent frustration of his long-suffering (though not for much longer) girlfriend, Annie (Rose Byrne). Crowe, envisioned as a kind of what-if scenario for if Jeff Buckley or Nick Drake hadn’t died but rather abruptly quit the music business and left public life, is an almost preternaturally perfect role for Ethan Hawke, who is having a hugely productive year between this and his possible Oscar nomination for First Reformed. The Ethan Hawke of the early-to-mid-’90s, the one who fronted the fiction Hey That’s My Bike in Reality Bites and was a pin-up poster guy for disheveled dreamboats everywhere is the perfect avatar for this reclusive rock star. The Ethan Hawke of Boyhood and Before Midnight and Ten Thousand Saints, the aging, slightly doughy DILF whose old charm shows its seams more and more is the perfect actor to play the modern-day Tucker Crowe.

Tucker doesn’t enter the story for a bit, though. We mostly see events through Annie’s eyes, and Rose Byrne is, unsurprisingly, more than capable of carrying the film as a dissatisfied woman looking to come into her own. Obviously Duncan doesn’t value her enough, and when her unvarnished opinions on a bootleg Tucker Crowe album (the titular Juliet, Naked) get aired on Duncan’s superfan message board, Crowe reaches out to compliment her good judgement, and an email relationship begins. From there, the film becomes half-Notting Hill and half-You’ve Got Mail. Byrne and Hawke develop a sweet, reticent chemistry; their relationship becomes as much about their deep concern for each other’s emotional well-being as it is about any kind of romance.

The great thing about a movie like Juliet, Naked, much like About a Boy, is that while conflicts and love triangles exist, the story never contents itself to set up good guys and bad guys. Annie and Tucker’s relationship had its beginning in Tucker’s near-disdain for his own legend, which makes it very easy to feel permission to dump all over Duncan as a fool who can’t even see that his idol a) kind of hates him, and b) is stealing his girl. Duncan, while clearly a schmuck in many ways, gets his moment later, at dinner with his hero, where despite being rather humiliated, he reminds us all that he’s a person with feelings and value too, and that his relationship to Tucker’s music is something he gets to keep as his own.

I’d almost be willing to bet that the genesis of Juliet, Naked was the idea of someone so obsessed with their favorite musical artist that they begin to wonder whether they’d be cool with him stepping in on his girlfriend. There’s a version of this movie that becomes far more about Duncan, his emasculation, and his newfound rivalry with his idol. Juliet, Naked far more intelligently sticks with Annie (and, thus, with Rose Byrne) as its focal point, and what results is a movie that’s quite sweetly balanced between unlikely romance and a grounded character study. And it lets great, likeable actors like Byrne, Hawke, and O’Dowd really shine through.

Where to stream Juliet, Naked