Nisha Ganatra’s “The High Note,” has a Tracee Ellis Ross problem, meaning that there isn’t enough of her in the movie. The script, procured by Flora Greeson, focuses chiefly on Dakota Johnson, which isn’t a bummer trade at all: Her deceptively breezy charm has enough strength to hold up even the hollowest pictures, no matter how many shades of grey they’re brushed with. But Johnson’s predominance here molds “The High Note” into a low key take on “La La Land,” a movie about white faces encroaching on black traditions and black spaces; all told, it’s a weird choice given Ross’ background.
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Johnson has screen roots, of course, a movie star born of movie stars. But Ross has roots in Motown, and the spirit of her mother, Diana Ross, is nestled alongside the spirit of “The High Note.” Johnson plays Maggie, beleaguered assistant to Ross’ soul singer icon, Grace Davis; they’re nigh-inseparable the way that remoras are inseparable from sharks, but with a more voracious appetite. Grace suffers neither fools nor disappointments nor misuse of her time gladly. She’s a woman constantly on the move. Like a shark, she’ll die if she stops swimming. Her manager, Jack (Ice Cube), facilitates that need, hammering out tour dates and gigs and, central to the picture’s drama, a Las Vegas residency, which would make the tour dates and bookings irrelevant. Grace isn’t against Jack’s plan, except that she’s totally against Jack’s plan. She just doesn’t tell him.
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As Jack plays marionettist with Grace’s career, Maggie thinks about her own, remixing live tracks recorded at Grace’s shows, cleaning them up, giving them a new shine. When she runs into David Cliff (Kelvin Harrison Jr.), a talented but unestablished (but also astronomically and inexplicably rich) singer, she gets it in her head that her experiences with Grace have taught her the ins and outs of producing and managing, and she fudges her credentials to help David get his career off the ground. Everyone here wants “more,” whatever “more” may be, or perhaps “better,” because “better” is relative: Maggie wants to produce, David wants to sing, Grace wants to reclaim her identity, and Jack wants to eat cake, even if his waistline tells him “no.”
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The pleasures found in “The High Note” are many and often minor; Ganatra builds the film on casual chemistry between Johnson and Ross, with Harrison Jr., fresh off of his 2019 one-two punch of “Luce” and “Waves,” popping up as Johnson’s alternative foil. Maggie’s ambition clangs against David’s reticence. Movies like this tend to reward the lead for stick-to-itiveness, and “The High Note” mostly follows the pattern. Maggie, so it seems, knows more about making it in the music biz than actual musicians, even though her actual job responsibilities include buying green smoothies for Grace (that she tosses away promptly and with naked disgust), maintaining her calendar, reminding her which city she’s currently performing in during dress rehearsals, and sacrificing her social life to help her boss pick out dresses for functions.
True to form for this particular rom-com niche, Grace is a boss from Hell. But “The High Note” happens to think far more of Grace than movies like “The Devil Wears Prada” tend to think of their own harridans. For one thing, Ganatra and Greeson are both aware that “white girl saves and fosters black musical talent” plots look unimpeachably cringey in 2020, and spend most of the movie distracting from appearances by coasting, and not in a bad way, on Johnson and Ross’ charisma; when a scene calls for belting rather than banter, Ross, who recorded her own songs, steps into her mother’s shoes and proves an impressive fit. There’s a baked-in haunted quality to the performance, like watching the specter of The Supremes captured on camera, even if the soundtrack is itself adequate at best.
But equally haunting is the sensation that “The High Note,” for all of its easygoing genre merits, has written checks it can’t cash with regards to its ingrained race problem. Grant that the movie tries to address the awkward whiteness in the room in an early exchange between Jack and Maggie, the former dressing down the latter to no lasting effect; their heated brush galvanizes her to continue down the producorial path, which might’ve read as infuriating with an actress other than Johnson in the part. Johnson has an irresistible presence defined by relaxed demeanor and quiet self-confidence; her natural persona is a Get Out of Jail Free card every pretty white girl is born with, but only to a point, being about an hour into the film when Maggie oversteps, the straw shatters the camel’s spine, and Grace loses her composure.
“Only five women over forty have ever had a number one hit,” Grace says in rebuke to Maggie, “and only one of them was black, in the history of music.” It’s the fundamental moment “The High Note” looks for as its first sixty minutes unfold, where whiteness is finally and mercilessly acknowledges, and Ross, finally given a juicy, dramatic speech to bite into, makes a meal of the scene: She pivots from domineering, in the manner of a Boss From Hell, to dominating, in the manner of a preeminent musician who’s worked too hard for too long to be told how the business works by someone so green that they probably piss grass. Ganatra sees Grace’s anger with clarity honoring Ross’ performance and her parentage. It’s refreshing, even invigorating, to see a studio rom-com tackle an issue as sticky as institutional racism with this kind of blunt force poetry.
It’s expected that “The High Note” eventually connects its many winding roads into a warm, healing resolution where the “better” its characters each crave is found, though in perhaps humbler forms; it’s like a Shakespeare comedy if Shakespeare’s comedies ended with twists and reveals set up nowhere else in the text. The coincidences land on the side of corny, though the shrinking stakes are appreciated as much as the loose hangout vibe and the inviting casting. Most of all, the film’s willingness to confront the elephant in the room, though delayed, is admirable—too little, perhaps, but not too late. [B]