Few filmmakers romanticize music — its magical ability to move and transform us — more than John Carney. His breakthrough hit, Once (2007), which follows an Irish busker with a guitar and a Czech pianist in Dublin, won over audiences, got an Academy Award for Best Song and inspired a Broadway musical. Flora and Son isn’t a remake, but Carney certainly borrows his earlier film’s tropes, from the hardscrabble lives of his characters to the story that includes their attempt to write a song together, and a plot in which romance and making music are inseparable. But why not borrow and tweak a formula so winning?
Flora and Son has the great advantage of Eve Hewson as Flora, the young mother of a 14-year-old boy, Max (a very natural Oren Kinlan), whose petty theft threatens to land him in juvenile detention. As she does in the recent series Bad Sisters, Hewson