Nitpicks or Crippling Flaws (YMMV, But Serious Music Fans Will Groan )
1) The least credible casting of any movie I've ever seen. Pacino is a great actor, but he does not and has never had rock star charisma. His best roles have always been as very intense, interesting guys that you have mixed feelings about.
And then there's the pair of characters who are supposed to be related, but it's laughable. Bobby Cannavale as Al Pacino's son is something I would expect to see in an SNL skit about bad casting directors. And brilliant songwriter types just don't have kids who are intellectually limited to construction work.
2) Nobody opens a concert with their biggest hit, as we see in the opening scene. (That it is his biggest hit is reinforced later on several occasions.) You close with the biggest hit, or even save it for the encore. In fact, none of the music stuff in this film rang true at all. Let me do one more that I don't think is much of a spoiler, although I'll tag it anyway --it's about a completely predictable, almost necessary plot point that happens pretty early -- before I explain why the scene that sets up the movie's last big plot turn is completely unbelievable.
It's not all that credible that a star who had stopped songwriting would start, and labor long and hard over a single song. What's more likely (and I'm speaking from experience as a rock critic of a local scene who has known many songwriters) is that, once you get back in the groove, the songs start coming quite easily.
That sounds like a nitpick, but it leads directly into the big, pivotal scene at the end of the second act, which is wrong from beginning to end; a classic instance of a screenwriter starting with the desired plot outcome, and working backwards from it, all truth and character logic be damned.
For the above reasons, I absolutely assumed Danny, after finishing that first song, would have had had three, four, or five new songs by the time of the small gig at the bar, the point of the gig being that he'd be sneak-previewing his new album. That he'd book the gig to get reaction to one new song is a stretch (I originally called it ludicrous, but that was overstating it) (and the whole bit where Mary's going to dinner with him depends on him playing the song is a hard-to-swallow invention that seems to be the best Fogelman could come up with, since neither he or any of his producers seems to know any of this basic music business 101 stuff).
Next, that he chooses to open the set with the new song is ludicrous. Aging acts who want to sneak in their new material do so in the middle of the set. This is not just well-known; it's notorious.
That the audience requests "Hey, Baby Doll" at the start of the gig is ludicrous. Nobody goes to a concert expecting to hear the star open with their biggest hit. It should be the song they expect at the end.
What's just crushing is that anyone who has ever been to an actual concert by an aging act could have rewritten this scene to be ten times as effective and infinitely more believable (I mean that literally, as in divided by zero).
Danny starts off as always, the crowd loves him. He announces that he's actually started writing a new album. Crowd goes half-crazy. He sits at the piano and starts to play a new song. Crowd starts attentive, but by mid-point, they're starting to chit-chat. Cut to him playing the big song that he's saving for last, the one that we saw him laboring over, and he has completely lost the audience, even though the stuff is great. Cut to him closing with "Hey, Baby, Doll" but Pacino lets us know that Danny is dying inside.
Re-write that scene (and tweak everything else involved with the music business*), cast it better, and you have a much better film. As it is, it barely sneaks into a B- for me.
* This is early and predictable, but I'll tag it anyway ... Cancelling a tour of the size that Danny is doing, in its middle, would be huge news, and he would have been hounded by paparazzi the entire time he was in NJ. You could have made the opening gig, whose only purpose is to establish him as a star for viewers, a special performance, in fact, the closing act at a big benefit concert. He's introduced, he does "Hey, Baby Doll" (hence fixing the first flaw I mentioned), and at the end of the song he's joined by cameos by actual rock stars. (Hey, that's better than the movie. You can work in his dissatisfaction with the aging of his audience in other ways; in the movie, it's introduced too quickly and obviously.) Then establish that his manager has almost finished booking his next big, tour, and they are about to go public with the news. When he gets the Lennon letter, Danny kills all that and goes underground.
Good Lord, how does a movie about the music biz get made by people so ignorant of it, that someone who knows it just a bit can punch it up and close its plot holes and incredulities with just an hour of thought?
Prepare your minds for a new scale of physical, scientific values, gentlemen.share