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This movie, more than any other in the genre, best represents the struggle, pain, love, hope, and desperation that truly goes into songwriting and the creative process overall. Once, written and directed by John Carney and starring Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova as the two unnamed leads, is a simple story about recording an album. Within that overall structure however we are treated to innumerable individual moments of loss, charm, desire, wit, and most importantly music. At it's core this movie and this story is a musical, but not in the Chicago, Dreamgirls or even Moulin Rouge sense. It's more grounded in a certain type of documentary style reality (highlighted by the seemingly amateurish camera work... and I say seemingly because it was obviously a conscious choice by the filmmakers to go gritty and hand held to focus on that realistic quality). The music doesn't just pop up out of nowhere... Okay, it does pop up out of nowhere on occasion, but it doesn't "feel" like it pops up out of nowhere. It's a thin line to toe, but when you see it and you take in the simple imagery and listen to the lyrics you'll know what I'm talking about.

Once is really a portrait of an artist and his muse. We're with him for one week and it turns out to be the most important and creative week of his life. He's a street performer who seems stuck, until a girl selling flowers on the street happens to walk by and everything changes. We watch as this couple slowly grow closer through the music they share and he (again, he's unnamed in the movie so a pronoun will have to do) begins to believe that he has the talent and the willingness to give it a shot. He falls for her and maybe she falls for him too, but we never really know for sure. The audience only gets to peek into that aspect of their relationship through the music.

There are many moments in this movie to fall in love with (like her dragging a vacuum cleaner around on the street, his elderly dad bringing in sandwiches and drinks as the band rehearses, or his beat up guitar with the hole in it), but the couple's first duet in the music store still stays with me. He shows her some of his lyrics and directs her through the song and she ends up singing perfect harmony to his lead vocals. It was a wonderful way to show the two characters coming together and the subtlety of the lyrics themselves tell an even deeper story.

I can't accurately describe the feeling I had while watching this movie. It was just like seeing and hearing pure joy for 75 minutes in the dark. I didn't even realize I was watching it with a big smile across my face until the end. And the fact that both of the leads did all of their own singing AND songwriting is just the icing on the cake. But it's all not gumdrops and licorice, I wasn't crazy about how distraught he was about losing his girlfriend, and they play one of the about six songs one too many times near the end of the movie. That's about it. Other than that it's the best movie I've seen this year and probably the best musical (if you can really categorize it as a musical) that I've ever seen. I'd like to quickly remark on a previous reviewer's comments regarding the camera work. I didn't find the graininess or muddiness distracting in the least and besides the digital video and hand held "look" of the film I recommend really going back and looking at the framing and editing throughout the film. Now I'm not one to laud the "realistic" look just for its own sake, but I think it works for this film and strengthens the story.

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