107 min | PG-13 | February 10, 2021 | Vertical Entertainment
A newly sober drug dealer becomes the sole guardian of her nonverbal autistic half-sister. A pop star directs. The result is a vanity project that mistakes a teenager’s neurology for a mood board.
Zu gets sober and inherits her half-sister Music when their grandmother dies. Music is a nonverbal autistic teenager who navigates her Los Angeles block by routine. The film positions itself as a story about reluctant caregiving and found family. What it actually delivers is a series of fantasy musical numbers staged inside Music’s head, where her interior life becomes an excuse for spectacle. The premise treats autism as a doorway to choreography rather than a condition belonging to a person.
Kate Hudson plays Zu as a tangle of recovery, debt, and panic, and she commits hard to the role. The performance asks for grief and gets mugging. Leslie Odom Jr. plays Ebo, the neighbor who teaches Zu how to care for Music, and he supplies the only grounded register in the film. Maddie Ziegler plays Music with a fixed set of grimaces, flapping gestures, and widened eyes that read as imitation rather than character. Ziegler is a dancer cast as a nonverbal autistic teen, and the film builds its entire emotional engine on that mismatch. Juliette Lewis and Mary Kay Place pass through with nothing to do.
Sia directs her first feature from a script she wrote with Dallas Clayton, and the seams show everywhere. The musical sequences abandon the muted street palette for saturated primary colors and hard frontal lighting, which severs Music’s inner world from the world she lives in. The editing cuts from documentary-style handheld realism into glossy music-video maximalism without a bridge between them. Sia shoots the numbers like extended versions of her own pop videos, which is the problem. The film keeps interrupting its story to perform, and the performances are about Sia’s aesthetic, not Music’s mind.
This is a film made by someone who confused good intentions with insight. It centers a disabled character and then hands her interiority to a neurotypical dancer to perform as spectacle. Every craft choice serves the director’s brand instead of the subject. The story of Zu learning to love someone she did not ask to raise exists somewhere underneath all the choreography. The film buries it under color and noise and never digs it back out.