Dandelion is two films I wish I could disentangle. One is an exploration of creativity and the creative act, through the lens of one musician’s struggle to keep her vocation a career (and vice versa). The other is a romantic drama about two people who find in each other the spark they were missing, and let it become their world for as long as they can hold back reality.

These strands are inseparable, constantly feeding back into and informing one another. This is, in my experience, unfortunate. I’m left unable to feel my admiration for the former without my indifference to the latter seeping through and tainting it.

Dandelion Captures The Growth Of A Young Artist

And those scenes are when the movie’s at its best

From writer-director Nicole Riegel, the movie opens on a difficult period for Dandelion (KiKi Layne). Though she pays the bills with her music, a point of pride, she’s disillusioned with her thankless gig performing in a hotel lounge to distracted clientele. She wants to take a risk; to bet on herself and try to play her music the way she wants, and see if the money follows. But her mother’s illness keeps her in Cincinnati, hesitant to test the waters.

One night, she boils over. She leaves work early to find her mother smoking in secret, and the ensuing fight gets too hurtful on both sides. She drives on a whim to South Dakota, where a motorcycle rally is holding a contest that could be a real break — an opportunity she’d initially dismissed, wondering if a largely white, male, country-inclined audience was right for a young, Black, female singer-songwriter from the Midwest. Her instinct wasn’t exactly wrong, and she enters that environment lost and overwhelmed.

Then she meets Casey (Thomas Doherty), who maybe wasn’t who she imagined she’d find in a place like this. He’s Scottish, for one, and in a difficult period of his own. He’s reunited with his band for the long weekend on (mostly) friendly terms, having left a few years earlier and traded in the troubadour lifestyle for a more stable career. Casey is, in some ways, further down the road than Dandelion; he’s stood at the same crossroads and made his choice. His hesitance to dive into the world of music has a different tenor than hers does.

In other ways, they are kindred spirits. He may take the lead, being the experienced one, but she is equally drawing him out of his shell. When they discover their connection is artistic as well as physical, they fall into each other. My favorite element of Dandelion is how song lyrics are repeated and recontextualized, as when Casey riffing on an unfinished song of Dandelion’s results in the two spontaneously and completely transforming it. When they perform it later, it has gone from an expression of Dandelion’s Act I frustration to the couple’s Act II joy.

In moments like those, I felt on this movie’s wavelength. Layne’s performance is a real strength, and she does a great job of not only anchoring us in her character’s emotions, but embodying how she feels about singing in any given scene. Through her, a song becomes an expression of how it felt to be alive at a particular point in time, and we get to experience the magic of how that manifests in songwriting and performance, both live and recorded. Riegel and Layne never lose sight of Dandelion’s journey as an artist, which I was thankful for.

Dandelion & Casey’s Romance Took Me Out Of The Movie

And kept me out by the end

But there’s something about the relationship between Dandelion and Casey that poisoned the well. It’s not the actors; Layne and Doherty have strong chemistry, and my favorite scenes in Dandelion work in large part because of how clearly that comes across. It’s more the romanticism of how it’s portrayed, the tone of which might be clear in how I’ve described this plotline so far.

These two are like young, naive lovers — their bond is as serious as it is sudden. They spout sweeping clichés and are arranged into some overtly artful frames. They traverse the highs and lows of human emotion, and Dandelion‘s emphasis on almost subjective close-ups means those emotions are sent to us at full aesthetic volume. These things aren’t inherently negative, nor are they things I inherently dislike. But in a film that is otherwise grounded, this romance feels jarringly unreal.

In a best-case scenario, we get swept up in that unreality with the characters. They forget their troubles for a while, and we share the heartbreak of the real world crashing back into their idyllic bubble. But the rest of the movie reinforces reality so clearly that I even had a hard time believing the characters would buy into this fantasy as much as they do. Whenever Dandelion’s personal and professional arc would draw me in, I would inevitably find myself pushed out again, until the climax of their relationship left me unmoved.

I cannot divorce what I connected to from what I didn’t. Dandelion’s growth as a singer and a person doesn’t happen without this relationship, and this relationship doesn’t become what it did without their ability to share their art. Perhaps characterizing Dandelion as two films is unfair, and just wishful thinking on my part. Regardless, I can hardly recommend a viewing experience that was so shaped by disengagement that, even when revisiting the positives in my mind, I cannot seem to shake it.

Dandelion is now playing in theaters. The film is 113 minutes long and is rated R for sexuality/nudity and language.