comic romance hits all the right notes

Rating: 7/10 (23 June 2007)

With its tune-filled tale of songwriting lovebirds, "Music and Lyrics" pokes good-natured fun at the accoutrements and defining elements of '80's pop music and culture.
Alex Fletcher is one half of a chart-topping duo known as POP! (obviously modeled on the real life WHAM!), that reached icon status in the mid 1980's. Since that time, while his opposite half (the George Michael of the team) has managed to blaze an amazing career as a solo performer, Alex has had to content himself with life as a certified has-been, appearing as a theme-park attraction and on 80's retrospective shows just to keep his name before the public. Suddenly, however, Alex is given the chance for a comeback when a Brittany Spears-like singer offers him an opportunity to write a new hit song for her. At just that critical moment, Alex meets Sophie Fisher, an insecure young woman with a talent for writing poetry, whom Alex asks to supply the lyrics for his melody. Soon, the two of them are writing up a musical storm and falling in love in the process.
Boasting a litany of snappy one-liners and spectacularly engaging performances by Hugh Grant and Drew Barrymore, the movie manages to hit its satirical points without reducing its targets to stereotypes and caricatures. The story, it's true, can't entirely escape the strictures of its romantic comedy formula (Alex has the requisite nervous-Nelly manager who lives in fear that his client will make all the wrong career choices, and Sophie has an overprotective, celebrity-obsessed older sister, who feels compelled to advise her younger sibling on all matters relating to the heart), but writer/director Marc Lawrence at least manages to insert a few narrative surprises along the way. Above all, the movie wins us over with its wit and charm, its knockabout humor and ebullient spirit, and its dead-on parodies of '80's fashions and music. The original score by Adam Schlesinger is pleasant and catchy in a slick, commercial-jingle sort of way, and the movie starts and ends with an uproarious takeoff on glam music videos from the mid 1980's. Finally, Kristen Johnston, Brad Garrett and Haley Bennett manage to bring warmth and depth to characters who could easily have been relegated to the status of cardboard cutouts in less capable hands.
"Music and Lyrics" may not be the most credible movie ever made on the theme of romance, but this upbeat tale of love in the music biz hits all the right notes.