High Strung Free Dance is a 2019 romance film about a young choreographer who casts a contemporary dancer and an innovative pianist in New York’s most anticipated new Broadway show.
Getting noticed is hard enough, but when you have genuine talent and the opportunities aren’t there, it can be even more disheartening. So it is for Charlie (Harry Jarvis), a piano player who should be on stage somewhere but is instead forced to deliver deli on his bike while he gets shown the door for jobs that can showcase his skills on the ivories. Meanwhile, there is Barlow (Juliet Doherty), a dancer looking for her break, paying the bills as a telemarketer while getting cut from each audition. Worse, her roommate splits and she about to get evicted. She makes a risky move that pays off in front of English choreographer Zander (Thomas Doherty), who is looking to fill parts for his upcoming Broadway show called ‘Free Dance,’ and then unexpected collaboration happens when Zander and Barlow literally run into Charlie. But getting to the top isn’t always easy.
To be sure, director Michael Damian‘s latest effort, High Strung Free Dance – his own follow up to his previous High Strung (2016) – is another fantasy come to life with little that feels the least bit authentic yet sort of gleefully jumps into the storybook whimsy of it all in telling a familiar and predictable tale of success. This is produced and presented for a very specific set of eyes and works hard to satisfy, as it subverts genuine challenges for real artists in favor of superficial hurdles in singing and dancing its way to the rousing end.
In a way, it, like many in this genre, cling plenty hard to the apron strings of classics like Fame while adding in highlights from hits such as Whiplash (one scene involving ‘rushing’ feels like a wedged in nod to that award-winning film), keeping this a traditional experience dressed in contemporary flares. Is that bad? Well, no, of course not, mostly because Damian seems to know what he’s making, High Strung and this follow up both purposeful use of the never-let-go-of-your-dreams formula that has been fodder for dozens upon dozens of movies from decades past and surely well into the future.
Either way, the good news is that this is not a shoestring effort, with some really talented young people doing their thing at the highest level, with Juliet Doherty especially compelling as she throws herself in the trope-laddled character. She’s energetic, convincing, and seems really accomplished while dancing. Jarvis does well, too, playing the frustrated pianist pushed into a corner. Thomas Doherty is the least affecting though, he funnelled into a tight mold that has him scowling and yelling all the time, his super young, chiseled runway model good looks not giving him much credibility, including his seen-from-miles-away tactics of how he treats the attractive young women in his lineup. But in the larger scheme of things, that’s what he’s supposed to be.
In all fairness, Damian wisely sticks to the unbelievable, the film aggressively committed to its previously-mentioned fantasy where these people all live in a world where music and dance are everything. That means some of them randomly break into song or rap even while this isn’t technically a ‘musical’ per se. Dance and vocal numbers spring up here and there in places that would surely have neighbors calling police, but hey, that’s not what this is about. This is aimed at the family crowd and as such, ticks all the right boxes for keeping this a safe watch for children inspired by possibilities in the arts. Look for Jane Seymour, who returns in this sequel, being the voice of wisdom, and pay attention to a lively score from Nathan Lanier that keeps is all upbeat.