Layne plays Dandelion, who when we meet her is strumming guitar and playing her delicate original songs to a restaurant bar clientele that couldn’t be less interested. The setting is Cincinnati (the actress’s own hometown, coincidentally or not), and the sense is that wherever the action is, it’s elsewhere. Dandelion alludes to a musical circle of friends who’ve gone on to better things while she’s remained behind to care for an ailing mother (Melanie Nicholls-King), the latter pouring cold water on her daughter’s future ambitions by reminding her that “there’s nothing cute about a 40-year-old troubadour.”
After one more argument, Dandelion impulsively gets in her car and drives west to South Dakota, where a biker festival is hosting a battle of the bands. Footsore and depressed, she connects with a friendly group of folk rockers — the real band Brother Elsey, led by brothers Brady, Beau and Jack Stablein, who play themselves. She’s also drawn to the group’s on-and-off collaborator, a lanky Scot named Casey (Thomas Doherty of “Gossip Girl” and “The Invitation”).
And here is where “Dandelion” becomes a curious and intermittently successful fusion of the 2007 Irish musical romantic drama “Once” and a Terrence Malick movie. Casey and Dandelion meet sweet and start exchanging guitar licks and song ideas, writing lyrics on each other’s arms when they run out of paper during a hike.
Their collaborations around tent campfires, in back alleys or in impromptu jam sessions with the Stableins and friends are allowed to play out in full, and the aura of a supportive midnight community of fellow musicians is heady. The songs are spare, rising to impassioned, with flickers of fiddle giving them body, and the Dessners’ background score is similarly charged with a sense of tender melancholy. Lauren Guiteras’s camerawork swirls through the carny atmosphere of the festival and the natural beauty of the nearby Badlands, equating love and lust with a softening of Dandelion’s career-oriented focus. Everything seems to happen at magic hour in this movie.
The problem is that there’s just not a lot of there there in “Dandelion.” The pace is leisurely to observant to slow, and even beautiful swooning gets tiresome after a while. Doherty gives his character shades of kindness, mystery and unreliability, and it’s never quite clear whether the heroine is naive in matters of love or just thirsty after a long drought. (That Dandelion is Black while Casey and most of the others are White is mentioned only once in passing, but it obliquely underscores her outsider status and the hot wire of anger that runs through even her quietest songs.)
Layne came to prominence as Tish in Barry Jenkins’s 2018 James Baldwin adaptation “If Beale Street Could Talk”; this is her first major lead role, and she holds the frame with a gentle insistence that at times takes a viewer’s breath away. When Dandelion is wholly inside her music — performing or composing or even idly picking out melodies while sitting beneath a city bridge — she carries her own magic hour inside her, and the refusal of the rest of the world to see it is what’s wearing her down. “Dandelion” is the story of how she gets her groove back, and only the star’s gift of presence keeps it from floating off on the breeze.
R. In area theaters. Contains sexuality/nudity and language. 114 minutes.
Ty Burr is the author of the movie recommendation newsletter Ty Burr’s Watch List at tyburrswatchlist.com.
