Uninspiring Once cover song Dandelion hides KiKi Layne's formidable voice

The title of writer-director Nicole Riegel’s Dandelion suggests it’s an allegorical tale about a sprouting seedling carried on a once-in-a-lifetime journey along a soft, gentle breeze. Instead it’s focused on two strangers caught up in complicated circumstances that pit head against heart. One is the eponymous woman seeking one last shot as a singer-songwriter, the other is a man desperately yearning to recapture his past dreams of music stardom. While Dandelion begins on a promising note and intermittently strikes the right chords, this cinematic symphony sours during its crescendo when it should be intensifying, bringing its stirring sentiments together in resounding harmony.

Dandelion (KiKi Layne) is battling obscurity and obsolescence, stuck in a dead-end gig, singing three times a week in a Cincinnati hotel bar for ungrateful clientele who’d rather be chatting and scrolling social media than paying her due attention. But at least she’s able to sing and write every day, she assures herself. Her nightingale trill flits over a tender acoustic arrangement of Gin Blossoms’ “Hey Jealousy” only to follow it up with an announcement about a car being towed. She suffers further humiliating despair at home caring for her ailing mother Jean (Melanie Nicholls-King), whose support of her daughter’s aspirations has reached its limit. Yet just as Dandelion’s dreams begin to dissipate, as she must pawn her beloved gold-top electric guitar (which symbolizes hope), a lifeline appears in the form of a “battle of the bands” flyer.

Frustrated by her lack of career prospects, Dandelion hightails it out of the city for the music competition, held at a biker rally in South Dakota, where the winner gets the opening act slot at the big Saturday night concert. She faces a daunting challenge, but isn’t alone. She meets Casey (Thomas Doherty), who’s in town to play with his former bandmates after a years-long absence during which he eschewed music for marriage and a 9-to-5 job. He’s handsome, kind-hearted, and, as it turns out, a stimulating creative collaborator. As they form a sparkling duo, voices and hearts intertwining in song and spirit, garnering acclaim and attention, their romantic relationship becomes tangled up in snags and worries, greatly affecting their last-ditch efforts at musical relevance.

Riegel, who made her directorial debut with the exceptional coming-of-age drama Holler, returns to the female-fronted dramatic milieu, this time harnessing the power of music to augment the narrative’s emotional pull. She captures the singer-songwriters’ passionate drives and creative processes with an authentic affection and respect for their craft. The graceful, fluid camera movements are as intoxicating as new love, enticing us into this budding affair and songwriting retreat. As we follow the pair on hikes, intimate performances in back alleys, on small stages and around campfires, the duo is framed in their full beauty, helping us fall in love with them as they fall in love with each other.

We’re further immersed in these musicians’ world through the sound design, which oscillates from softly reflective during vulnerable moments where the focus is solely between the singers and their music to caustic surround sound where the scope widens to include roaring applause or rude reactions. Riegel keeps us dialed into Dandelion’s psyche as we hear her open-hearted lyrics battle against the noise of rowdy crowds in her hometown bar and at the rally. The National’s Bryce and Aaron Dessner (a.k.a. Taylor Swift’s frequent songwriting collaborators) contribute to the soundtrack with a few originally-penned tunes, lending their hit-making hands to musically finesse these characters’ internalities through lyrics. Brady Stablein and Grace Kaiser (both cast in supporting roles as Casey’s bandmates) also do heavy lifting, gifting a few sequences with their motors, whether it be in songs they wrote or in expository dialogue they deliver that shades Casey’s character.

The juxtaposition of sublime Malick-esque shots of the couple in nature canoodling and collaborating (tree branches and leaves rustling in the wind, perfectly framing their smooching session) with the jarring wake-up call of roaring motorcycle engines represents the pair’s warring internal conflict of fantasy versus reality. Riegel, along with cinematographer Lauren Guiteras, keeps the color precisely in tune with Dandelion’s feelings, turning from a warm, golden glow when she’s happy and secure to a cooler-tinted palette when she’s overwhelmed and defeated. Editor Milena Z. Petrovic’s slow dissolves from the surrounding forest’s flora to the couple in transitory phases both physically (motorbike riding or walking) and emotionally (evolving from collaborators to lovers) increase mood and atmosphere.

Considering all this, it’s a surprise that, narratively, the hero and her paramour are done somewhat of a disservice. Though Dandelion’s ambitions seem untainted, there are scenes where she bemoans her lackluster social media following and the fame that comes with popularity, making us think her reasons aren’t completely pure. It’s also disheartening to see a Black woman’s confidence and stage presence only bloom courtesy of a white dude entering her life, reinvigorating her artistic endeavors and stoking romantic fires. On top of this, despite knowing about Casey’s marital status and his predilection for leaving his bandmates in a lurch, Dandelion handles the inevitable and totally predictable final conflict poorly. Still, Layne is an incandescent revelation, elevating the material. She’s the heart and soul of the film, instilling her character with magnetism, nuance and commanding strength.

For Casey’s part, his character represents a cautionary tale about settling for a mundane life, but it’s hard to ignore that he primarily exists to further Dandelion’s arc. Doherty—who’s played a Harry Styles-modeled pop star on Girls5eva to a far better and more poignant result—shines when singing, but experiences trouble delivering dialogue, failing to stand out as someone worthy of our heroine’s affections in the first place. His version of discreet and secretive doesn’t work, playing it as mousey and mush-mouthed.

Worse, Dandelion loses much of its identity whenever it pulls from John Carney’s 2007 musical romance Once without giving it a new spin. Not only does the second act regurgitate all its basic story beats (like the exciting confidence boost recording a single brings, as well as the emotional rush that accompanies the spontaneous conception of a song), it does so without a greater understanding of why that film’s interpersonal dynamic works to transmit its electric charge. An unrequited, unspoken heat between the amateur songsmiths in Once lends itself to greater heartache when they part—unlike the requited union here, which only serves to slight our heroine and leave us with a reductive, less compelling tale.