Linda Holmes

And it's so important to him to be able to have – ownership is a weird word, but to be able to have connection between

publicly and an artistic legacy and to be able to say I wrote that song and to be able to tell his wife and his daughter I wrote that song and I very much like the fact Stephen and I talked about this too I very much like the fact there's a moment early on when Paul Rudd with the wedding band wants to play some of his original songs not this one but some of his original songs and

And one of his bandmates is sort of like, listen, people at weddings don't want to hear your original songs.

You are, he says, a human jukebox.

They want to hear songs they know that's what weddings are for.

And it kind of can sound cynical.

Like, I half expected at some point in this movie for it to be like, no, you should play your original songs at weddings and

And put them out there for people because what really matters is your creativity.

But this movie never attempts to tell you that that wedding band guy is wrong about what you should play at weddings because it lives in a reality of what it is to be a working musician, which is that this setting may call for one thing and this setting may call for something else.

Paul Rudd and Nick Jonas are both actors I would refer to as charismatic presences in this movie, but in really different ways.

Totally.

The thing that makes me love this film is that I think it appreciates a lot of different things about being creative.

It's okay to want to make a living.

It's okay to want credit.

It's okay to want...

the adulation of a room full of people singing your song.

All of those things are normal and fine and good, and you don't always get them, but it's okay to want them.

I like the way it tries to sort through all that stuff.

And even though I started off saying what I thought the film was about, I completely agree with Kristen's take on what it's about also in terms of that it's not really about playing stadiums, or at least it has to be about more than playing stadiums, partly because

A vanishingly tiny percentage of musicians will ever play stadiums.