The centerpiece of Nicole Riegel’s Dandelion is the eponymous character (KiKi Layne) taking a chance on a biker rally music festival in South Dakota. A Black singer-songwriter living in Cincinnati, Dandelion initially scoffs at the idea when the bartender at the hotel where she plays three days a week slides her the flyer for the festival. White people on motorcycles who probably want to hear rock or country isn’t exactly her scene. But she goes, and it goes poorly—until, that is, she meets a charming guitarist named Casey (Thomas Doherty).
The folky compositions that result from Dandelion and Casey collaborating on music are a far cry from the acoustic cover of Gin Blossoms’s “Hey Jealousy” that we first see Dandelion play back home. The downfall of many a music-based film is often the music at its center, but the songs that these lovers play together—courtesy of the National’s Bryce and Aaron Dessner—are quite good, ably shouldering the heavy emotional burden that Riegel’s film demands of them.
The intensity of the relationship between Dandelion and Casey is communicated mainly through sound and image. Riegel and cinematographer Lauren Guiteras often capture the characters in grainy close-ups of eyes, hands, and mouths, letting voice and body language demonstrate how life informs art and vice versa. And the subsequent cracks in Dandelion and Casey’s relationship are less spoken of in obvious terms than demonstrated through the music they make, tainting the well of emotion they both draw from in order to write and perform.
Around the edges of that relationship, Dandelion isn’t nearly as lyrical. Especially early on, the film strikes quite a few false notes, as when one of Casey’s bandmates voices the most eternal of musician clichés in a debate over the viability of making money: “It’s about the music.”
So much of making art is about confidence, and while Riegel has set aside some of the clattering obviousness of her debut feature, 2020’s Holler, she still doesn’t fully trust her textured images to do the talking. When Dandelion has a spat with her ailing mother, Jean (Melanie Nicholls-King), their arguments sound less like natural expressions of their frustrations than an overly tidy and wholly unnecessary shortcut to laying out their circumstances.
That’s unfortunate because the scenes that show Dandelion scrounging for cash and a shot of the mother’s oxygen tank are evocative and explicit enough. Elsewhere, far more is being said when the young woman coldly asks her mother what kind of sandwich she’d like than the entire shouting match that comes later. By the end of the film, Dandelion has taken steps to find a powerful, resonant voice, and in such moments, you may hope that Riegel isn’t too far behind.
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