Flora and Son

Available on Apple TV+

John Carney has won plenty of plaudits for previous works such as Once and Sing Street, which incorporated original musical pieces into grounded tales about ordinary Dubliners, and his latest, a twee comedy about single mother Flora (Eve Hewson) and her strained relationship with her teenage son (Orén Kinlan), is certainly made from the same mould.

In an attempt to quell her child’s delinquency, Flora swipes an abandoned guitar from a skip and gifts it to him as a belated birthday present. However, when the gesture is emphatically rejected, she decides to embark on her own musical journey with the aid of Jeff (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), an online guitar teacher residing in California, with whom she quickly makes an emotional connection.

Hewson demonstrated her comedic chops in the stellar Bad Sisters and it’s therefore unsurprising that Flora and Son is at its most engaging when it is centred on the mother and son dynamic that lies at its core, with Kinlan demonstrating plenty of potential in his role as a passive aggressive teen that keeps his surprising musical talents well hidden.

Unfortunately, the film does not work as well when its focus shifts to Flora and Jeff, whose budding romance fails to convince (chiefly because it never escapes the confines of a Zoom call) and is bogged down by the sort of punishing tunes that you’d expect the likes of Ed Sheeran or George Ezra to subject you to. In that respect, Flora and Son feels like a back of a cigarette packet job from Carney and his long-term musical collaborator Gary Clark.

This is a shame because it feels like there is a decent film laying dormant in here somewhere, although the aforementioned work of Hewson and Kinlan is enough to keep you somewhat engaged throughout the picture's modest runtime.