Brett Haley on Hearts Beat Loud, a balm for our crazy world

We hear Brett Haley, director of sweet indie drama Hearts Beat Loud, before we see him. Milling around a corridor in Edinburgh’s Caledonian Hotel ahead of our interview with the American filmmaker, we hear a diatribe coming from behind frosted glass and look over to the film’s PR disconcertingly. “Have you seen this?” he says to the PR while waving his phone as we’re led into the room. “Fucking Trump junior.” We breathe a sigh of relief: this is an angry rant we can get on board with.

It turns out the Commander-in-Chief’s greasy heir has just used the word “lit” in a tweet celebrating the retirement of Justice of the Supreme Court Anthony Kennedy, meaning daddy will be able to replace him with a lap dog. “Well that’s that word fucking ruined,” says Haley. We were warned beforehand that the filmmaker was a tad groggy from his red-eye flight from New York. If Trump and his progeny are good for one thing, it’s clearly making you forget about your jetlag.

Haley’s apoplexy is completely at odds with Hearts Beat Loud, the film he’s in town to present at the Edinburgh Film Festival. A music-tinged coming-of-age story, it centres on the tender relationship between Nick Offerman’s Frank, a middle-aged widower and former rocker who now runs a failing record store in hip Brooklyn neighbourhood Red Hook, and his daughter Sam (Kiersey Clemons), who's about to fly the nest to begin college on the West Coast. You’ll be hard-pressed to find a sweeter, more warm-hearted film this cinema season.

It’s clear that Haley has plenty of irritation at the state of his nation, but he hasn’t channelled it into his work – quite the opposite in fact. “It’s too fucking boring to make the anti-Trump movie,” he says. “That’s too easy. I’m not interested in yelling into the void. We’re all so angry, we’re all so divided and we could easily just keep yelling at each other. I have my opinion and everybody else has their opinion and no one’s listening and everyone’s yelling, and it’s a really sad time. And it’s what lead me to Hearts Beat Loud quite frankly. I was basically looking at my next movie as the opportunity to be positive in some form, just to keep me from going crazy, because it is such a sad time.”

Hearts Beat Loud certainly fits the bill. It’s not a musical, but music flows through it, connecting the characters (the father and daughter bond by forming a band) and letting them express their emotions when words just won’t cut it. Haley’s influences are wide-ranging – he cites “High Fidelity, obviously, and That Thing You Do, and a little bit of Once, and there’s Sing Street in there, and Inside Llewyn Davis, and Linda Linda Linda, a Japanese film that I love.” Out of that blender comes a charming film with its own flavour. “It’s our own spin on the band movie,” is how Haley describes it. “Ours is not about fame and fortune, it’s about something completely different.”

That something different is a family bond, and specifically the difficulty a father has in letting his daughter grow up. Offerman, still best known as Ron Swanson, the meat and Scotch-loving government official and lovable grump from sitcom Parks and Recreation, is an actor blessed with a deep reservoir of melancholy as well as some well-honed comic chops. It’s rare to see him in a leading role, but he brings a winning blend of curmudgeonly hipster and corny dad to the role of Frank, who’s forever wearing a crumpled band T-shirt and a scowl on his face.

Offerman played a supporting character in Haley’s previous film Hero, from 2017, and the director explains that he and his writing partner Marc Basch always wanted Offerman for Hearts Beat Loud. “Writing with an actor in mind is very helpful,” says the director, “especially one who you think you can get. I try not to write with Tom Cruise in mind – I adore him, but he’s not going to be in my movie. So that was a great thing, to have Nick in both of our minds and thinking, ‘Oh, this is what we’d like to see Nick do.’”

Fans of Parks and Rec will be familiar with Offerman in fatherly mode: his protective relationship with sarcastic office intern April Ludgate (Aubrey Plaza) was very much in the margins of the show but was one of the elements fans most loved about it. It’s rewarding to see Offerman explore this side of him in more depth here. “You get to know Nick and you think, 'why aren’t you the lead of something?'” says Haley. “He can do anything, why not see an actor that you love and admire do something a little different – that’s how I look at it as a fan.”

“It’s too fucking boring to make the anti-Trump movie”

Stories of father-daughter relationships are surprisingly rare in modern cinema. When they do crop up, it tends to be in the form of a cheesy action movie in which the daughter’s role is merely to be kidnapped or degraded as a catalyst for the muscle-bound dad to kick some arse – think Commando or the Taken series or this year’s Death Wish remake. Surprisingly, though, the father-daughter bond has been at the heart of many a great American indie film this summer, including Debra Granik’s new drama Leave No Trace and Bo Burnham’s celebrated debut Eighth Grade. Can Haley account for this welcome trend?

“It is interesting that these movies all come out at the same time,” he agrees. “Obviously Debra and Bo and I, we didn’t sit around and say, ‘Hey, let’s all do this father-daughter thing.’ But I think it’s cool and I think it’s obviously something that’s been lacking, that sort of true, complex connection that exists there [between father and daughter]. For whatever reason – maybe there’s something in the air – that made it the most interesting dynamic to explore for us.”

Even rarer than seeing a realistic father-daughter bond on screen is seeing creativity (in this case the art of composition) explored in compelling fashion. Early in the film, Frank manages to tear Sam away from her studies and convinces her to jam with him. Tinkering on keyboards, Sam comes up with a melody that piques Frank’s interest, and before they know it they’re laying down a pop banger on GarageBand, with Frank adding guitar and drums and Sam providing a soaring vocal and slick synth. Haley isn’t a musician himself, but he’s managed to do what many filmmakers have struggled with in the past: make creativity cinematic.

He says he took a lot of inspiration from watching Hearts Beat Loud's composer Keegan DeWitt at work. “I paid attention and I took notes, took videos, and would constantly lean on him and say, does this make sense? Does this feel real? Is this how you come up with melodies? Is this how you figure out a bassline?” The aim was for these composition scenes to feel both real and dynamic. “The creative process a lot of times is boring and slow and not cinematic, so you try to find that balance, to give people that moment where they’re like, ‘Oh, there’s some magic happening here.’”

DeWitt is something of a stalwart of the US indie scene. Name an American indie darling from the last few years and he’s probably had a hand in the music, from his wonderful collaborations with Aaron Katz (Quiet City, Cold Weather) and Alex Ross Perry (Listen Up Philip, Queen of Earth) to titles like Chad Hartigan’s This Is Martin Bonner, Joshua Locy’s Hunter-Gatherer and Hannah Fidell’s upcoming The Long Dumb Road. Over the course of the film, we hear Frank and Sam play three of DeWitt’s songs. Offerman and Clemons perform them with gusto, and they’re undeniably catchy.

“Trust me, there are people who don’t like the songs,” Haley counters dryly. “And if you don’t like the songs, you’re not going to like the movie, and there’s nothing I can do about that. If you’re only into Nordic death metal, you’re going to hate it.” Even if synth pop and sweet ballads are not your jam, there’s much to admire in DeWitt’s compositions. “I think what’s great about them is that they do some of the narrative lifting. They had to be songs that weren’t just cool to listen to, they had to move the story along, move the character’s journey along.” In other words, they provide the emotional connective tissue between the scenes; without them, Hearts Beat Loud wouldn’t be half as potent.

Haley’s ambitions for the film are pleasingly modest: he simply wants it to give you a warm hug. “It is such an angry, fearful, hate-filled time, so by putting a little bit of goodness into the world it will, I hope, help. Even if you’re having a bad week and you see Hearts Beat Loud and it makes you feel this much better" – he makes a space between his thumb and forefinger just wide enough to slide a pound coin – "I’ll take it. That has worth.”

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Hearts Beat Loud is released 3 Aug by Park Circus