That Thing You Do! (1996)

Tom Hanks made his directing debut with a small, warm film about a Pennsylvania bar band that stumbles into a hit in 1964 and stumbles back out again. The Wonders are four young men, a girlfriend who handles their stage clothes, and a song that will not leave the radio. Nothing in the picture is angry. Nothing in it is trying to teach us anything, which is precisely the quality that made reviewers reach for the word inconsequential and mean it as a compliment.

Where the film permits itself a sliver of social critique, it concerns the machinery of the music business. Mr. White, the Play-Tone representative with the reassuring smile, renames the band, dresses it, books it, and eventually hands it material the label has already approved. Jimmy, the songwriter, quits rather than record someone else's tune. That is a cautionary tale about contracts and corporate control, delivered with a shrug. It stops short of systemic indictment. The label is not the villain; it is merely the weather. The film proposes no alternative economy, and the epilogue hands Jimmy a successful career anyway.

The rest of the ledger is bare. The cast is white, the lone Black supporting player drifts through without comment, and the film asks nothing of him. Faye exists to fold shirts and absorb Jimmy's temper, and no feminist framing rescues her from that function. There is no environmental content, no body politics, no neurodivergent character, no reinterpretation of the 1960s, and no lecture. A deleted scene implies something about Mr. White's private life, but a deleted scene is not the film. The film leaves us with a pleasant period piece about luck, timing, and the brevity of fame. It has no agenda to advance. It has a song, and the song is good.