Two music movies

Not everyone might know it, but Once wasn’t, in fact, Glen Hansard’s acting debut. He was also one of the band members in the titular band that the charming little movie The Commitments is about. The one with the abundance of red curls, to be precise. And when I say abundance, it’s rather an understatement. In all fairness, his role is a fairly small one.

The movie’s lone slightly original touch is that the main character isn’t a musician, but the band manager Jimmy, who interviews himself at length from the (imagined) vantage point of later success. The relative lack of drama about all the partner swaps, or rather, about who sleeps with which background singer, is remarkably cliché-free, and all in all, for a movie about all-out soul, this is a remarkably low-fi movie. I liked it quite a bit… but it was the other music movie (also, incidentally, with a clear link to a 2007 film) that I really, completely, unapologetically loved.

That movie was… *drumroll*