115 min | PG | March 13, 2020 | Lionsgate
Christian rocker Jeremy Camp falls in love with a college classmate the same week she learns she has cancer. The Erwin brothers build a faith-based biopic around the gap between the prayers and the prognosis. Sincerity is not the same thing as honesty.
Jeremy Camp arrives at a California Christian college with a guitar and a plan to play music. He meets Melissa Henning at a concert and falls for her fast. He also meets the band’s frontman Jean-Luc Lajoie, who loves Melissa too. Then Melissa gets a cancer diagnosis, and the film becomes a test of whether belief survives contact with the worst thing that can happen. “I Still Believe” wants to dramatize doubt. It mostly dramatizes the certainty it already arrived with.
KJ Apa plays Jeremy as earnest and clean-scrubbed, all open face and acoustic strumming. He sings well and never finds the anger that the story keeps promising. Britt Robertson plays Melissa with more interior life than the script supplies, holding fear behind a steady smile in the diagnosis scenes. Gary Sinise plays Jeremy’s father Tom with weathered restraint, and he grounds every scene he occupies. Shania Twain plays Jeremy’s mother Terry and gets almost nothing to do. Nathan Parsons plays Jean-Luc as the wounded third point of the triangle, then the film discards him once his usefulness ends.
Andrew Erwin and Jon Erwin direct with a glossy worship-video sheen that flattens the suffering at the center. The cinematography bathes everything in golden hour light, including the hospital scenes, which drains the illness of any physical reality. Melissa looks luminous while dying, and the camera refuses to show the body the disease actually attacks. The script by Jon Erwin and Jon Gunn telegraphs every beat and resolves each crisis with a song cue. The musical performances are staged like crescendos, and they substitute volume for the emotional excavation the material requires.
This is a film that asks the hardest question a believer can ask and then flinches from its own answer. It wants to sit with the silence of unanswered prayer. Instead it fills that silence with a power ballad. Jeremy Camp’s real story contains a grief the movie cannot bring itself to look at directly. The Erwins make a comfortable film about an uncomfortable subject, and the comfort is the failure.