With ‘Flora and Son’, John Carney Makes the Case for Using the Same Three Chords

John Carney’s 2013 film Begin Again was originally titled Can a Song Save Your Life? That title could also apply to Carney’s previous movies Once, Sing Street, and now Flora and Son. Carney frequently returns to the concept of music as a transcendent force where the power of songwriting can bring people together in a way that nothing else can. While we frequently demand “range” from our artists and a “What else have you got?” mentality, Flora and Son makes a strong case for Carney that he doesn’t need to go beyond his particular niche when what he’s playing sounds so good.

Set in Dublin (like Once and Sing Street), Flora and Son follows the eponymous Flora (Eve Hewson giving one of the best performances of the year), a young woman struggling to raise her rebellious 14-year-old son Max (Orén Kinlan). When she purchases Max a guitar for his birthday and he rejects it, she decides to take up the instrument herself by doing online lessons with the handsome instructor Jeff (Joseph Gordon-Levitt). As she starts learning music, it allows her to bond with Max, who’s drawn to being a DJ and mixing tracks.

In Flora’s first meeting with Jeff, she asks him how many chords he knows, and he replies that the number of chords isn’t really important. He then proceeds to play her the same song twice, the first time a basic playthrough and the second time with far more texture, grace, and artistry. He explains that both versions use only three chords, but that looking at only the chords misses all of the individuality and personality the musician brings to the song. This feels like Carney’s thesis statement about his movies, where he’s well aware that there’s a shared theme between several of his features, but that doesn’t mean he’s singing the same song every time.

As a film critic, it’s easy to fall into a bad habit of simply pointing out pattern as critique. You see it in cheap social posts where someone claims that an actor plays the same character every time or that Martin Scorsese only makes gangster movies. But pattern recognition is simple observation devoid of appraisal. To fall back on, “Well, they’re being redundant” instantly discards the differences in favor of what’s new. Do Once and Flora and Son have thematic similarities? Absolutely. Are they the same movie? Obviously not. If your issue is that Carney keeps returning to make movies about music as a binding force, then I need know why exactly that’s a bad movie to make if he’s still telling it effectively.

Because there’s nothing really wrong with Flora and Son. The performances are terrific across the board (Joseph Gordon-Levitt can give me guitar lessons any time), and the character arcs have a unique shape because it’s a coming-of-age story as well as a mother-and-son story. Flora, forced to become a mother when she was only 17, is now trying to figure out what she wants her life to be, and finding if that concept can exist with Max, or if it has to exist outside of him. The stuff with Flora and Jeff is charming (even if his musical opinions can be a little mansplain-y), but the emotional core is Flora, with all her faults, becoming a better mother not by erasing herself in favor of Max but by finding talent she didn’t know she had.

The reasons Carney’s best films work so well is because the emotional core always clicks into place. I wouldn’t say that Carney is a virtuoso director, but I also wouldn’t discard him when he’s found a story he’s passionate about telling, because he tends to tell it well. Overlapping elements between his best movies doesn’t mean Carney is a one-note storyteller. While I don’t know if he’ll ever recapture the unique beauty of Once (a film that feels just as much borne of Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová musical ability and performances as Carney’s writing and direction), I also feel like Carney has also moved on somewhat showing music not only as a romantic force, but also one able to encompass all kinds of love.

To only see Flora and Son as another “music binds us” story is to miss how the film appreciates the way we limit women, especially mothers, into certain roles, and say they’re only allowed to find themselves when their children are adults. By leaning into Flora’s immaturity at the outset of the film, the film has the freedom to argue that there’s no deadline to becoming a better parent, finding a new interest, and letting those two concepts feed off each other. This isn’t a movie where Flora sheds the things that make her unique or removes her personality as a sign of maturity. Instead, she finds the music inside herself and how sharing that song impacts the lives of the people she loves. Is it a familiar tune for Carney? Sure. That doesn’t mean it’s played out.

Flora and Son is now streaming on AppleTV+.