‘Dandelion’ Review: KiKi Layne is Electric in Wilted Story of a Musician’s Journey | Chicago Critics Film Festival

Most actors count themselves lucky to land a leading role. In the case of Dandelion, the new film from writer-director Nicole Riegel, the movie is lucky to have its leading actor. KiKi Layne is the bright shimmering sun around which the rest of the movie revolves, using her natural charisma and talents to create a full-dimensional character who’s impossible to not root for. However, Dandelion isn’t executed in a way that matches Layne’s abilities. The film is, on occasion, a lovely exploration of the difficulties faced by a musician trying to remain true to their inner artistic ideal. But too often, it strays from this path, often quite literally, as its characters spend a great deal of time wandering through the film.

Dandelion (Layne) is, like so many indie protagonists that have come before her, a struggling musician. The only reliable performance opportunity she’s been able to land in her hometown of Cincinnati is a three-nights-a-week gig playing covers in a hotel restaurant. Fed up with the only consistent audience she can find treating her with indifference at best, she sets out on the road in a Hail Mary attempt at success. She drives all the way to South Dakota for a music contest at a biker rally and ends up meeting Casey (Thomas Doherty). He’s a guitarist who left his music dreams behind, but is looking to reconnect with his old bandmates. He and Dandelion hit it off quickly, embarking on a journey of passion, both for each other and for the art of songwriting.

This is far from the first film to explore the difficulties of trying to make it in the music scene. Hell, John Carney has made an entire career out of telling those stories. What sets Dandelion apart is the titular character herself. She’s at the end of her rope and it’s very clear that her South Dakota expedition is her final attempt at making a name for herself. Unlike most characters in similar films, she barely believes in herself. She’s been worn down by rejection and disinterest to the point where, when a man at the rally steals her guitar case, she hardly makes an effort to chase him down. There’s something truthful about seeing such insecurity played out on-screen not as a source of inevitable inspiration but as a reality. Putting yourself and your art out there over and over again, only for it to be consistently swatted down, is taxing on the soul. As her mother tells her, “There’s nothing cute about a forty-year-old troubadour.” Dandelion has been humiliated and hurt, and her wick is nearly burnt out. She’s shown to default to shrinking herself and accepting defeat whenever faced with an obstacle, which only makes the audience want to cheer her on even more.

And KiKi Layne is the perfect actor to bear this burden. She’s naturally magnetic, with a compelling energy that makes her well-equipped to star in this film, where she’s virtually always on-screen. In Barry Jenkins’s masterpiece If Beale Street Could Talk, (which was, astoundingly, her film debut) she showed that her face and the camera are a perfect match. Her expressions always tell so much about her character’s inner life and thoughts, even when her face is seemingly in a neutral state.

But the screenplay is so excessively dramatic and overwrought, even an actress as capable as Layne isn’t able to sell every moment. She has two major combative scenes which reach excessive heights of emotionality, as dictated by the script, and Riegel’s direction allows no room for a natural build to such an agitated state. Doherty is similarly hampered in his ability to deliver the fully enchanting performance required of his character. How exactly does one sell a fully sincere line like “Tell me what you love about Cincinnati”? And like Layne, he’s tasked with depicting a sudden emotional outburst later in the film with little aid from the film’s pace, resulting in a moment that’s simply hard-to-watch, and not in the way the film means it to be.

Additionally, the screenplay can’t help but slide into a languid pattern once the lovers’ mutual attraction is established. For the better part of an hour (or at least what feels like it), we follow Dandelion and Casey as they wander around the gorgeous South Dakota landscape, which is seemingly in a state of perpetual golden sunset. What’s clearly supposed to feel swoony and transportive instead comes across as tedious, as the pair meanders over or around yet another mountainous vista or river shore. Things aren’t helped by the sappy dialogue that the actors are encumbered with, sounding less like a classic cinematic pairing and more like the kind of overly-affectionate couple that you wouldn’t want to sit near in a restaurant. At one point, while they’re lounging on a cliffside, Casey states that he wants to declare something profound in relation to art. She counters with, “Who’s gonna hear you all the way up here?” to which he responds, “The world.” This type of cloying, cutesy dialogue severely weighs the film down rather than making it soar, as clearly intended. However, one scene does stand out as a genuinely charming oasis in the film’s desert of sentimentality. Early in their situationship, they ascend to an outlook on a peak and Dandelion plays Casey one of her songs. After their only scrap of paper is lost to the winds, they take turns writing new lyrics on each other’s arms and playing music together. It’s a seriously endearing start to their romantic adventure, with their equally beautiful singing voices combining to make something close to greatness.

Riegel’s camera is deployed in a way that’s often confounding. At times, the stunning sunsets of the Plains perfectly silhouette and accentuate our central couple in truly spectacular fashion. At other times, the film uses focus in unexpected ways, often shooting fully out-of-focus on purpose. One bit character named Mountain Mama never even gets the dignity of having her full face shown, at least while not cloaked in shadows, which is an odd choice considering she’s given a lovely mini-monologue about her late musician husband. It’s one thing to make creative technical choices, it’s another to do so in a way that mostly distracts. Despite some pacing issues, the film is well edited, making particularly good use of double exposure. One standout moment shows Dandelion struggling to construct a new song, intercut with flashbacks to her past – both moments that the audience was privy to throughout the film and footage of Dandelion as a child (although why her toddler years, which must’ve been the early 1990s, are shown as if shot with a 70s home camera is a mystery). It’s an effective scene that accurately depicts the haphazard, difficult, and inevitably autobiographical process of creating art. In addition, the film’s sound work is unquestionably well done. The music is well-balanced throughout, and the film smartly uses its sound mix to subtly put the audience in Dandelion’s head. When she plays for unfriendly audiences, the aggressive noises of their inattention or heckling, depending on the situation, play just as loudly through the speakers as her music.

Much like the main character, it’s hard to watch Dandelion make unsuccessful attempts at greatness. KiKi Layne is a welcome presence, as always, but this film is destined to, like the seeds of the flower it’s named after, merely float away on the breeze.

Grade: C

This review is from the 2024 Chicago Critics Film Festival. IFC Films will release Dandelion in theaters later this year.