102 min | PG-13 | June 5, 2020 | Paramount Pictures
A band manager loses her teenage guitarist son in a crash. Years later she decides a ten-year-old guitar prodigy carries his soul and rebuilds the band around the kid. The movie thinks this is heartwarming.
Gina Jackson manages a rock band and loses her son Vaughn, the lead guitarist, in a car crash. Years later she meets Oak Scoggins, a ten-year-old guitar prodigy, and becomes convinced the boy carries Vaughn’s soul. She pulls the old band back together and builds it around a child. Mighty Oak presents reincarnation as a marketing problem solved by grief. The film treats a mother’s refusal to mourn as inspiration rather than warning.
Janel Parrish plays Gina with a fixed brightness the film never lets crack. Gina decides a stranger’s child is her dead son, and the performance stays sunny through every scene that should disturb. Tommy Ragen plays Oak and handles the guitar work himself, which gives the music scenes a charge the writing around them lacks. Alexa PenaVega plays Valerie, Oak’s mother, who hands her son to a grieving woman with almost no resistance. Levi Dylan appears as Vaughn in flashback and exists mostly as a memory the movie keeps polishing. Raven-Symoné turns up as Taylor Lazlo and gets nothing to do.
Sean McNamara directs the concert sequences with more conviction than the drama between them. The band scenes use tight handheld coverage and let Ragen’s playing drive the energy. Everything outside the music flattens into soft daylight and clean suburban interiors that drain the story of stakes. Matt R. Allen’s script raises the obvious objection to Gina’s belief and then drops it. The film wants the supernatural premise to read as comfort and refuses to sit with how strange it is to recruit a child to replace a dead son.
The pieces of a stranger film sit inside this one. A mother who cannot let go. A boy asked to be someone else. A band built on a lie everyone agrees to believe. Mighty Oak notices none of this and plays the whole thing as uplift. It sands the unease out of its own idea until nothing is left but a guitar and a smile.