The High Note

It feels as if about 50% of this movie accurately captures the music business, while the other half is a fluffy confection of pure fantasy — and that’s a formula that works perfectly in an escapist film such as this.

Playing the love interest, Kelvin Harrison Jr. does as much as he can with an underwritten character. Ice Cube, as is increasingly the case for the veteran musician-turned-actor, steals every scene in which he appears.

The High Note is a breezy way to kill a few hours. Granted, it's more an opening act than a headliner, but that simply makes its digital, on-demand residency feel like the venue where the film rightfully belongs.

The existential crises of music industry hotshots in Los Angeles might struggle to mark it out, to say the least, as a film for our moment. At the same time, it’s a refuge – a balmy vision of cloudless blue skies, rooftop martinis on someone else’s tab, and a few soulful jamming sessions in a recording studio no one’s using. You could disappear into Nisha Ganatra’s film for a couple of hours and easily forget where the evening went.

Tracee Ellis Ross kills it as a believable soul diva in a harmonious pairing with Dakota Johnson — a shame, then, that a distracting romcom plot ends up so high in the mix.

The High Note is pleasant enough but disappointingly timid and thoroughly implausible.

There are some comedies that seem to have been rubbed all over with an anti-funny, anti-romance Kryptonite. This is one. It’s the cinematic equivalent of elevator muzak – a festival of glam-smug with zero chemistry between any of its three leads.