Danny Collins (2015)

Dan Fogelman's 2015 feature debut concerns Danny Collins, an aging rock star of the 1970s who has spent four decades marinating in cocaine and his own back catalog. When his manager surfaces a forty-year-old letter from John Lennon, Danny decamps to a New Jersey Hilton to reconcile with the grown son he never met. The premise is borrowed from the real Steve Tilston, a folk singer who received a similar letter and did not read it for thirty-four years. The film then proceeds along a redemption arc of the most familiar construction, executed by a cast of established white performers who are all very good at what they have been asked to do.

There is no social program here. No racial reckoning, no environmental sermon, no revision of the historical record. The music industry's cruelties are personal mechanics, not an indictment of capital. Women occupy the roles of wife and romantic interest and seem content to remain there. The single flicker of contemporary cultural awareness arrives through Hope, Danny's seven-year-old granddaughter, who has ADHD and whose acceptance into an exclusive school for children with special needs serves as the film's demonstration that its protagonist can, in fact, love someone other than himself. The condition is treated with sympathy. It is also treated as a device.

The earnestness is real, and it is aimed squarely at the viewer's tear ducts. Critics found the redemption beats heavy-handed and predictable, and they were correct. But the sermonizing is domestic, a lesson about fathers and sons and the courage required to answer a phone call from a doctor. Nothing in the film asks us to reconsider society. It asks us to feel warmly about a wealthy man who learns, late, to be pleasant. The result is a gentle, well-acted picture that poses no threat to anyone's politics and makes no claim on anyone's conscience beyond the usual two hours.