Why isn’t KiKi Layne a bigger name? It’s still early, but she’s been mightily impressive since turning in a luminous romantic performance in Barry Jenkins’ If Beale Street Could Talk. She followed that up playing a soldier who gains immortality in the pandemic Netflix action film The Old Guard and a suicidal 1950s housewife in Don’t Worry Darling. Now in Dandelion (which is currently playing at the AMC theaters in Grapevine and Arlington), she portrays a singer-songwriter in need of a creative recharge, and it turns out that on top of everything, she can play guitar and sing, too. Every generation needs a small-scale musical like Once, and if this movie isn’t on the same level as John Carney’s Irish masterpiece, the main character being a Black musician is significant.
She portrays the titular character, whom we first see in a Cincinnati hotel singing a cover of Gin Blossoms’ “Hey Jealousy” to a half-full lobby of tuned-out guests and clearly having reached the point of, “Why am I still doing this?” When she comes home and finds her mother — who’s on an oxygen tank — smoking a cigarette, it’s the last straw. She drives off to play a biker rally in South Dakota where, among the overwhelming amount of white people there, she finds Casey (Thomas Doherty), a Scotsman who missed his chance to make it big in music.
Writer-director Nicole Riegel made a distinguished feature debut with her autobiographical pandemic release Holler, and here she makes good use of the Black Hills setting that gives our heroine a break from the familiar landmarks of the Queen City. (Fun fact: Layne is from Cincinnati in real life.) Dandelion’s disastrous initial gig at the biker rally with men calling for her to take her shirt off feels all too real as well. Not everything works here — Dandelion’s blow-up with her mother feels stagey and melodramatic — but the stop-and-start rhythms of her romance with Casey are pleasing.
What keeps this movie from Once territory is the lack of that one great song that crystallizes what makes the musical partnership special, the way “Falling Slowly” did for the Irish movie. The songs are primarily by Bryce and Aaron Dessner (with assists from many others, including Riegel, Layne, and Doherty), and I will say I like them better when they’re not trying to be classical musicians. Casey’s minor-key number “Honey” has a clever slow burn, and Dandelion’s up-tempo song “Over-the-Rhine” (given the title “The Ghosts of Cincinnati” in the film) is the bit where you really believe that she’s a headliner in the making.
Riegel clearly has a deep sympathy with people for whom, as one character says, music is a way of life and not just a way to make a living. Dandelion is the work of a filmmaker on the rise, and as for Layne, we still don’t know what the limits of her capabilities are. She deserves more chances to show us.
Dandelion
Starring KiKi Layne and Thomas Doherty. Written and directed by Nicole Riegel. Rated R.
