Dirt Music

Every so often, a movie comes along that isn’t particularly good, yet somehow gets to you — even as your eyes start to roll, they can’t look away. “Dirt Music” is one of those, a strangely fascinating delivery system for so much visual beauty that its flaws scrabble to gain a purchase.

A gritty romance that only translates some of the source material’s poetic bent to the big screen.

Dirt Music eventually arrives at a deep, thought-provoking moment – but it takes the entire film to get there.

Even when Georgie and Lu share the screen, there’s a curious emotional distance which means that this theoretically torrid romance never fully ignites.

Centered on characters who act without much in the way of logic, with much of its dialogue confined to clipped bursts of unsatisfying Hemingwayisms, “Dirt Music” is a fine-looking romance that never finds the right key.

While Hedlund and Macdonald exhibit incredible chemistry, the outlandishness of the twists “Dirt Music” takes makes their performances nearly impossible to appreciate due to their cartoon buggery. Working with “Notebook”-level cheese, here the story’s stale.

For those who like their romance movies filled with unnecessary mysteries, murdered dogs, poached lobsters and the ghosts of deceased little girls, Dirt Music will fit the bill. All others need not apply, not even if you’re into the kind of Nicholas Sparks-style drama this movie shamelessly marinates in for an interminable 105 minutes.