In Awakenings, Penny Marshall’s film version of Oliver Sacks’s book, patients who had developed a sleeping sickness in the interwar period “wake up” amid the upheaval of the late 60s. Based even more loosely on Sacks’s essay “The Last Hippie” than Awakenings was based on his book, The Music Never Stopped features a different kind of Rip Van Winkle: a hippie dropped into the Reagan era with virtually no memories after 1970.
When the movie begins in 1986, Henry and Helen Sawyer (J.K. Simmons and Cara Seymour) are a couple whose staid routine is upended when their adult son Gabriel (Lou Taylor Pucci), a dropout whom they haven’t seen in 18 years, turns up in a hospital. Gabriel has a brain tumor that has destroyed much of his memory, as well as his ability to interact meaningfully with other people. But his parents soon discover that he responds strongly to music, and they hire a music therapist (Julia Ormond) to work with him. Realizing it is the only way to communicate with Gabriel, Henry immerses himself in the music he thought had “poisoned” his son all those years ago, when the two of them clashed over politics and culture, prompting Gabriel to leave home. The reunion culminates in a vividly recreated Grateful Dead concert at the Hammerstein Ballroom (to which Henry has won free tickets through a funny and triumphant series of calls to a radio station).
This sentimental but touching film plays as a more dramatic version (or, for some, a wish-fulfillment fantasy) of latter-day reconciliation between Baby Boomers and their parents. It’s also a valentine to the diverse and vibrant music of the late 60s and early 70s that has since been ossified as classic rock. Fans may envy Henry when he sits down with a big stack of records by the likes of Dylan, Donovan, Cream, and the Stones to experience it all for the first time — a vinyl lover’s fantasia. Much of this music has suffered from decades of overexposure, but the film uses a few deep cuts, such as Buffalo Springfield’s haunting “Kind Woman,” to good effect. It also neatly bridges the generation gap by linking The Beatles’ version of “Till There Was You” to Peggy Lee’s. One of the key tunes, though, is a new creation: “Summer Song,” by the fictional Tulips, which so accurately mimics naïve psychedelic pop I took it for a lost hit (it was written and recorded for the film by Kraig Johnson of The Jayhawks).
The ever-reliable, ever-endearing Simmons gives a confident, moving performance, while Seymour, Ormond, and Scott Adsit (better known for comic roles) lend strong support. Pucci, who played the troubled teen lead in 2005’s Thumbsucker, tackles the toughest role, and he convincingly portrays both a 17-year-old rebel and a 35-year-old neurology patient, despite the efforts of his wig (in the 60s scenes) and fake beard (in the 80s scenes) to undermine his authenticity. His dialogue works against him, too — in 1968, he’s both a teen and a hippie, so he’s doubly self-righteous, and the fact that he’s right about Vietnam and Nixon doesn’t make his attitude any more bearable. In the “present-day” scenes, he spends too much time gyrating in pie-eyed wonder while spouting jive like, “Aw man, I love the Dead! They just play what’s in the air!” Of course, that’s how a lot of Deadheads behave, whether they have brain tumors or not. It demonstrates that music nuts, whether their “bag” (as Gabriel would say) is psychedelic rock or big-band swing, can wax pretty corny about their loves, and that all music, from Bach to Basie to Beatles, has value, because somebody somewhere is moved by it.
Veteran producer Jim Kohlberg, debuting as a director, has crafted a film that is lean and smooth, if stylistically anonymous. The period details for the 80s are nicely understated, and for the 60s they’ll only seem garish until you pull out some old family photos. If, like me, you know more than any sane person should about release dates and the order of album tracks, you’ll notice inaccuracies. But any film that emphasizes music so heavily is bound to include a few of these, and it gets so many of the minutiae right that I assume the most glaring anachronisms — the use of wonderful tracks from Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty (both released in 1970) to conjure memories of 1968 — are cases of artistic license.
The Music Never Stopped is most graceful in its closing act, when it demonstrates that life is what we share with others. The communication the Sawyers achieve with their son through music is severely limited — Gabriel is a kind of a record himself, bound to repeat the same tune every time you drop the needle. But it’s something, and it’s a hell of a lot more than what they had before. Sometimes that’s all we can ask for, and we have to make the most of it.
