Anne Hathaway tends to alternate between bigger and smaller films as she picks her roles; between Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar and the upcoming Disney sequel Alice in Wonderland: Through the Looking Glass, she eked out the time to shoot the romantic musical drama Song One, which premiered at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival. Song One was met with a mixed response at Sundance, but those of us unable to make the annual pilgrimage to Utah will get to make up our own minds about it this coming January.

In Song One, Hathaway plays Franny, an archaeologist who returns home when her folk musician brother Henry (Ben Rosenfield, Boardwalk Empire) is put into a coma following an ugly car accident. To deal with her grief, Franny uses Henry’s journal as a guidebook through Brooklyn’s modern folk music scene; along the way she bumps into James Forrester (Johnny Flynn), Henry’s idol, and the two strike up a relationship.


Song One may be most remarkable for the legitimate musical talent it boasts. Flynn is himself an accomplished folk singer (not to mention his work with the Propeller theater company’s all-male Shakespeare troupe), but the soundtrack includes original compositions from Jenny Lewis and Johnathan Rice (otherwise known as the stage duo Jenny and Johnny), as well as live performances from contemporary folk luminaries like Sharon Van Etten, The Felice Brothers, Naomi Shelton and the Gospel Queens, and Cass Dillon, among many others.

Is that enough to carry a film on its own? For a mainstream audience, Hathaway herself may be Song One‘s biggest draw; if nothing else, her involvement in the film proves that she isn’t content to stick to blockbusters and prestige pictures alone.

Song One Hathaway Flynn Song One Trailer: Anne Hathaway Mourns Through Music

Anyone with a strong affinity for folk music stylings may gravitate toward Song One on the strength of its aural accompaniments alone, and it represents the feature-length writing/directing debut for filmmaker Kate Barker-Froyland; meaning, it’s a story about a woman truly told from a woman’s perspective, which are still hard to come by in the movies nowadays.

if you’re a fan of John Carney’s filmography, Song One looks like a cross-amalgam between his films like Once and Begin Again (though perhaps a bit more melodramatic than either of those). We’ll see if the film hits the same notes after New Year’s.

Song One opens in theaters on January 23rd, 2015.