Rudderless | Movie Review

I have a thing for music-related movies, not musicals but the ones who involves a band or a person’s music career.  As soon as I saw Rudderless’ trailer before it came out I just knew I would love it. I don’t know how I managed to completely forget about it (it wasn’t released in my country) but as soon as I remembered it, I watched it.

And fell in love with it!

I can’t tell you how much I was
touched by this. It goes a bit deeper than what you expect from the trailer and the topics being talked about are pretty complicated. It causes you to dig inside yourself, thinking about stuff from another angle. That and of course the super amazing songs included.

So, it’s about this man, Sam, who is kind of a workaholic whose son, one day, dies. Trying to adapt to his grief, he moved away and two years later he’s living on a boat and paints a person’s house for a living. His ex-wife drops him his son’s, Josh’s, CDs which contains the songs he was recording and working on and, listening to these songs that Josh wrote, he begins to discover a whole new side of him. He sings one of the songs at a local bar and soon he’s in a band that performs his son’s songs.

The songs are amazing. I have to tell you that Begin Again was one of my favourite movies of last years and I’m still a little obsessed with its soundtrack. However, here the songs weren’t just good songs. They meant something; we were seeing Josh, trying to understand him. We are sad for his death because we can see how much Sam is hurt, but the songs are the only piece of Josh that we can know him from so we can grieve him too.

Quentin, the one who created the band for Sam and the guitarist, was surprisingly inspiring. I loved seeing him fighting for what he loves and I loved how Sam was helping him. It was good for both of them since Q obviously lacks a father-figure and for Sam who no longer has a son he can take care of and give advice. I didn’t necessarily like Anton Yelchin’s acting that much, but he did a decent job.

I don’t know much about directing and I knew this was a directing debut to the, um, director so I tried to concentrate. All I have is that the flow between scenes were smooth for me. I showed the movie to my friends, though, and one of them felt like the scenes weren’t complete, like it cut out quickly. I don’t know, I didn’t feel it. Also, I noticed that the scenes where they were performing tended to be in close up. It worked for me, but I guess some may be annoyed by that.

All in all, I really, really, loved this movie. I was deeply affected by it and the message it’s bearing. I love stories about people dealing with grief and that had a unique situation (I won’t tell you ‘cause spoilers). The songs are still stuck in my head, Sing Along and Stay With Me being my favourites.

Final Rating: 9/10 stars!!

P.S: After watching the movie I went and searched it on Pinterest and almost all the results were Selena Gomez. GOD, she was only present in THREE SCENES! It’s seriously irritating me because Billy Crudup’s performance was SUPER IMPRESSIVE. Just saying.