Sappy ‘August Rush’ has its moments

Keri Russell stands out as a mother who follows the music to a son she never knew she had.

By ROGER MOORE

ORLANDO SENTINEL

In literature they call it “magical realism,” that emotional blurring of the real with the surreal.

In the movies we call it “manipulation” and “contrivance.”

But for all its patently absurd situations, its occasionally cloying characters and its naked tugs at the old heartstrings, “August Rush” still finds a way, every so often, of dropping a lump into your throat.

It is “Oliver Twist” meets “Fame,” this story of an orphan boy who knows he can find his parents if he can play a song that tells them he’s here. First, of course, he’s got to meet The Artful Dodger and learn the guitar, then go to Juilliard and land a big concert in Central Park.

Yup. Absurd.

But magical things happen to Evan (Freddie Highmore). To him, there’s always a song in the air.

“All you have to do is listen.”

Bullies at the orphanage can’t stop him “from hearing the music.” He has faith. He knows his birth parents hear the same music. It’ll bring them together.

Only they don’t know he exists. Mom (Keri Russell, radiant) was once a student cellist of great promise. Louis (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) was an Irish singer-songwriter with the world seemingly at his feet. They met, had a magical night together. But events conspired to keep them apart. And then her father told her the baby died.

Eleven years later and something is tugging both adults in the direction of a child who has run away from the orphanage, made his way to New York and fallen in with a musically predatory Fagin figure (Robin Williams, his hair dyed mean and red). Evan learns to play the guitar in a thumping, Stanley Jordan style.

The kid’s a prodigy — Evan, now stage-named “August Rush,” suggests a little of what drove Salieri nuts about Mozart. He picks up instruments and musical notation on instinct. If you take your children to see this, teach them Arthur Rubenstein’s famous crack when a tourist asked directions.

“How do I get to Carnegie Hall?”

“Practice, practice, practice!”

In the movies, August Rush doesn’t need to.

Van Morrison’s moondancing “music of the spheres” wafts through this Kirsten Sheridan (and four screenwriters) film. Sheridan, making her Hollywood debut, manages some transcendent musical moments with the street buskers August falls in with, a gospel choir, and parallel concerts that musically connect the cellist to the rocker to the prodigy.

Sheridan can’t keep her toes out of the cheese, though. Some moments are insipid enough to make your eyes roll.

Her actors save her. Highmore is winning, if a little out of his depth. Williams is both a ham and a believable creep, Meyers lip-syncs well and Terrence Howard turns up to tear-up, this time as a social worker hunting for the missing Evan.

But Russell, TV-trained to show every emotion on her face in close-up, sells “August Rush.” She believes there’s some note missing from her song and she makes us believe that, too. She’s also the most convincing musician in the film.

It’s not quite magical enough, and certainly not the least bit real. But blame it on the holidays, the season, what have you — somehow “August Rush” will make you hear its song, or at least a verse from it, here and there. All you have to do is listen.