‘The Greatest Hits’ Proves How Difficult It Is to Make a Great Movie about Music Fandom

In the classic 2000 film High Fidelity, Rob (John Cusack), the owner of a Chicago record store, awes one of his colleagues by mentioning a new organization scheme for his personal collection. It’s not alphabetical, not chronological but… autobiographical. “If I wanna find the song ‘Landslide,’ by Fleetwood Mac,” he explains with hushed, self-impressed relish, “I have to remember that I bought it for someone in the fall of 1983 pile, but didn’t give it to them for personal reasons.” It’s an act of obsession (and, yes, self-obsession) that only a hardcore fan could love, and vanishingly few movies have attempted to depict. It also feels like the direct inspiration for The Greatest Hits, a new movie hitting Hulu that’s practically its own accidental treatise on the difficulties of making music fandom work on screen.

An autobiographical record collection is also what Harriet (Lucy Boynton) is after, though her reasons are more urgent, and somewhat less self-indulgent, than Rob’s. She is still grieving her boyfriend Max (David Corenswet), who died in a car accident, and living in his memory – literally. The same accident left her in a coma, from which she emerged with a bizarre ability: If Harriet hears a song with which she has a powerful (or, really, seemingly any) personal association, she will be transported back in time to that moment. Her present self blacks out until the song ends, at which point her consciousness returns to the present. This condition has allowed her to revisit her time with Max, and search for ways to steer him away from the accident, perhaps saving his life and bringing him back to her. She also must studiously avoid unplanned music-listening, so she isn’t knocked out of her present-day life without warning.

As a time-travel story, The Greatest Hits is not extraordinarily well-conceived. The movie does not attempt to sow doubt that Harriet is actually traveling through time, yet she also doesn’t present much evidence that she can actually alter the future on her four-minute pop-song trips, so it’s not clear why she believes so fervently that she can. Her failure to change Max’s fate – we’re led to assume she’s been at this for at least a year – is vaguely chalked up to songs that don’t get her quite close enough in time to make a stronger impact through conversation (for reasons not really explained, she only ever talks around what she’s trying to warn him about).

But as a music-nerd story, the movie is irresistible – frustratingly so, when it becomes clear that, like so many movies about music fandom, The Greatest Hits is blowing it. Granted, it’s probably asking too much for any movie, nevermind a romantic time-travel fantasy, to match High Fidelity, which boasts countless advantages: Trust in an exacting source material from novelist and sometime music critic Nick Hornby; the hangdog-hipster persona of star and cowriter John Cusack in full bloom; large-scale scene thievery from Jack Black; and a willingness to portray music nerds as combative, self-centered, encyclopedic, hilarious, and maddening as they can be in real life. The same high degree of difficult is present in High Fidelity’s same-year counterpart in fandom, Almost Famous, which took band-strife material that’s often fodder for dopey biopics and filtered it through the viewpoint of a young journalist who doubles as an infatuated fan. For whatever reason, the year 2000 was a high-water mark for movies with a bone-deep understanding of how pop music colors, enhances, and sometimes messes up our lives without actually depicting the lead characters as musicians themselves.

That’s precisely what The Greatest Hits is aiming for, so it’s disappointing to watch it with the growing realization that it’s the cinematic equivalent of answering a question about music taste with “I like everything.” More specifically, Harriet, Max, and Harriet’s possible new love interest David (Justin H. Min) like a lot of gauzily tasteful midtempo contemporary pop, in addition to plenty of equally tasteful and unassailable old classics. Though it’s always discomfiting to watch a music-loving movie where it seems increasingly possible that someone will throw on Ed Sheeran, the real problem with The Greatest Hits is writer-director Ned Benson doesn’t let his characters actually talk about music at any length, or with any particular idiosyncrasies. Austin Crute, playing Harriet’s obligatory sexually fluid best friend, is the person onscreen who ever really goes so far as to express dislike for a song or artist. In other words, he’s the only one with particular taste in a movie that insists on noncommittally liking everything.

This isn’t an uncommon affliction – the internet recently celebrated another Rex Manning Day, paying tribute to the cultishly beloved comedy Empire Records, which has about as little discussion of music as humanly possible for a movie set almost entirely at a record store. The Greatest Hits isn’t quite so empty-headed about its ostensible subject, but it does recall that autobiographical-organization scene in High Fidelity, only drained of that movie’s music-nerd context. Here, Harriet barely seems to have any relationship to songs beyond their connection to scenes from her life.

Occasionally, this results in a funny, surprising observation, as when she’s knocked back in time by, of all things, the supernaturally irritating KARS-4- KIDS advertising jingle. (The movie’s right: If you’re unlucky enough to tie a specific memory to that one, it’ll never leave you.) Most of the time, though, it reduces songs to personal totems; despite Harriet’s former interest in music production as a career, she apparently has countless memories of songs that are vividly and exclusively tied to dull what-should-we-do-this-Sunday conversations with one old boyfriend. Most of them aren’t even songs they bonded over, or from albums they introduced to one another. They’re not idiosyncratic works of their own art; they’re easily subsumed into Harriet’s life soundtrack.

A movie that poked at the solipsism of that idea, toying with the one-sided relationships that can form between artists and listeners, might be a new music-nerd classic. But the geekiest questions about Harriet’s situation are never asked: Does it have to be the exact same version of the song, or are studio, live, remixed, or cover iterations all fair game? (She repeatedly jumps back to a live-music memory using what seems to be a studio recording of the same song, but is that because the music is largely electronic and easier to reproduce, or is she actually listening to a live album?) Has she become obsessive and hermetic about the music (presumably largely released after Max’s death) she can safely use to drown out unplanned encounters with her memory music? How does that change her relationship with post-Max songs? Has she willed pop music into background noise out of necessity or myopia?

Instead, the movie has her performing a half-assed scavenger hunt, searching for the right song that will send her back at the right perfectly timed moment to save her boyfriend’s life. Despite the movie’s love of vinyl – credit due, this is one of the few mainstream movies I’ve seen acknowledge the 21st century boom in special-edition colored vinyl; it’s a very cinematic-looking fad! – there’s never a scene where Harriet uses, say, a subsequent track on the same album in an attempt to buy herself more time. The songs are treated as discretely and interchangeably as the “random Spotify playlist” she half-dismisses at one point. (Frankly, Rob puts more coherent planning into running down his old exes in High Fidelity.)

It probably isn’t fair to dismiss The Greatest Hits on the basis of insufficient nerdery. (As a new-lease-on-life romance, it has its watchable charms.) But movies about music fandom don’t have to be all nerdy interiority, either. Almost Famous packs a lot of joy and heartbreak into its single fictional tour, and I Wanna Hold Your Hand depicts Beatlemania through amped-up farce, giving the most ridiculous acts of devotion a kind of demented soul. Benson’s movie yearns for an easier relatability that doesn’t involve the artist at all – so their lack of presence ultimately doesn’t matter. The thing is, if a movie taps into their wavelength, hardcore fans can return obsessiveness in kind. Movies like The Greatest Hits bring out the worst in fandom – not by holding up a mirror, like High Fidelity, but by activating offense-is-the-best-defense annoyance as its mildness. It’s hard to make greatest-hits background noise for an album-oriented audience.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.