It’s been two years since Harriet’s (Lucy Boynton) beloved friend Max (David Korensuet, soon to be Superman) died in a car accident that she blames on herself. But she still sees him everywhere – literally, thanks to a nifty time-travel device that director Ned Benson uses quickly and intelligently in The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby sequel, The Greatest Hits. You know how a song can take you back to a moment in your life? For Harriet, who also suffered a nasty blow to the head in the same accident that took Max, it is life. Whenever she hears a song that she and Max have been listening to together, bamshe briefly goes back in time to the first moment they both heard the song for the first time.
For someone with a badly broken heart, it is agony. And for someone who thinks they can change the past through these brief visits, it could be even worse. When we first meet Harriet, she’s full of “Memento,” outfitting her cute Los Angeles apartment with a wall-spanning timeline that traces her entire relationship with Max, including the songs they love. She’s surrounded by boxes of gramophone records (some labeled “tested,” a few “untested”), and when she’s ready, she plays a record, sits in a soft chair, facing two speakers, and lets the music fly, Maxell commercial style. (The film, of course, comes with a fantastic soundtrack, including covers and remixes, and a generous helping of Roxy Music to hold it together.)
Hazy flashbacks to their love story reveal the broad form of Harriet and Max’s relationship, all dreamy dances and sexy splashes across the ocean. We know, of course, that it all ended somehow—and badly, since no one has ever put together a coherent timeline that didn’t go through it. Meanwhile, Harriet’s current disheveled, drunken state suggests that this is much more than the usual heartbreaking blues.
Benson, best known for his three-part romance The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby, doesn’t waste too much time getting into the time-travel conceit that frames the film, and soon we see Harriet singing a song and immediately being plunged back into the weather. We learn that Harriet doesn’t just relive her memories through her enviable record collection for fun (although she does that too). She’s also searching for the moment (and the unknown song that unwittingly set it) when Harriet could change everything, the moment when she could stop the accident that took Max and ruined her life.
When she’s not time-traveling through song, Harriet does her best to minimize auditory intrusions into her life: she wears earplugs and headphones to go outside, works in a library (the best quiet zone in the world), attends group therapy (where she remains mostly absent, despite the best efforts of the kind therapist played by Retta), and doesn’t even look her best friend Morris (a wonderful Austin Krut) until he tells her it’s “safe” (read: he doesn’t play any songs from her greatest hits list). She lost many friends. She gave up her dreams of working in record production. She has nothing but a desperate (and potentially insane) drive to right the wrongs she blames for ending all her dreams.
Benson, who also wrote the film’s screenplay, knows his way around heartbreak, and despite the lofty nature of the story — she time travel, for goodness sake—always finds room to add truly relatable elements to Harriet’s plight. A broken heart doesn’t just break you, it breaks everyone around you. Harriet can fixate on things she could potentially change (again, via time travel), but anyone who has gone through the end of a cherished relationship can relate to her desperation to get to the root causes and change them.
And just when it seems like Harriet’s broken heart—and the narrow world she’s trapped in—is gone forever, something crazy happens: she meets a new person. Try to explain everything this to him. Fortunately, she meets David (the adorable Justin H. Min) at her grief support group, where he arrives with his own issues and traumas to spare. If the flashbacks we get of Harriet and Max’s relationship are good, the here-and-now attraction between Harriet and David is even better, and Benson and his cast skillfully tie the stories together, making us care about both equally.
Maybe Harriet feels that way too, but even as she falls in love with David (and tries to make new memories with new songs), she can’t shake Max. And when Benson leans into the more “temporary” elements of his story, Harriet’s different love stories, her different realities collide in myriad ways. While not every choice works—spending time alone with David, for example, distracts the audience from Harriet’s unique perspective and Boynton’s buoyant performance, which is so compelling to be a part of and watch—it all leads to a classic “now prove you actually travel in time!” trope, the real human emotion of The Greatest Hits keeps it grounded.
In the end, it is Harriet’s best friend, Maurice, who delivers the hardest blows in Benson’s film, pushing Harriet to confront the full impact of her painful sense of nostalgia. Where would Harriet and Max be if the accident never happened, Maurice wonders. Where would Harriet be? What a diabolical thought to put into her world, in this movie. And as Harriet begins to drift away from her desperate attempts to save Max, she must consider something much bigger: how to save herself. It’s going to take more than a record or two, more than sweet time travel, and damned if The Greatest Hits can’t end on a high note.
Degree: B
The Greatest Hits premiered at SXSW 2024. Searchlight Pictures will release it in select theaters on Friday, April 5 and on the Hulu streaming platform on Friday, April 12.
