Director: Jim Kohlberg
Writers: Gwyn Lurie, Gary Marks, Oliver Sacks (essay “The
Last Hippie”)
Starring: J.K. Simmons, Lou
Taylor Pucci, Cara Seymour, Julia Ormond, Tammy Blanchard, Mía Maestro, Scott
Adsit
“The Music Never Stopped” is
an oddly paced drama. It has a kind of Lifetime/after school special feel to
it, but it’s a good treatment.
It tells the true story of a
man who lost his memory and was treated by using rock music to reconnect him
with the memories he formed when he originally listened to the songs. The movie
isn’t really about that man so much as it is about the man who shaped him in
his formative years—his father. The great character actor, J.K. Simmons, plays
the father, whose son walked out of the house twenty years earlier. When he is
finally returned, it is as a near vegetable.
Simmons is probably best
known as Juno’s father from that fabulous movie. He’s wonderfully cast here as
a man set in his ways, a father who sees his little boy grow into a teenager
affected by the rock music of the late sixties. He feels his son was poisoned
by those tumultuous times and that the music contributed greatly to his son’s
corruption. Now, the only hope his son has is to dredge up all those memories
his father saw as poisonous as the only way to jump start his brain.
In a way the father went
into stasis after his son left home. Nothing changed for him over the years.
Throughout the course of the film, it is the father that changes, not the
patient. Eventually, it is the dad who is calling up the local rock station
trying to win tickets to the Grateful Dead concert.
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