Kirsten Sheridan’s second feature as director is, in the nicest possible way, like something daydreamed by a teenage girl staring out a classroom window. August Rush, her tremendously imaginative reworking of Oliver Twist, is a gushing, lovely fairy tale that swirls around Big Ideas about harmonics and the universe. Freddie Highmore, the heartbreaking little chap from Finding Neverland and Tim Burton’s Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, essays the orphan of the title, a romantically minded child who waits for the parents he has never known to come and fetch him.
A musical prodigy, August is the product of a brief encounter between an Irish rock star (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) and a cellist (Keri Russell) whose father keeps her under lock and key. For different reasons neither participant in this doomed fleeting romance knows of August’s existence. Determined to rectify the situation, August uses his musical gifts to work their magic and bring the family back together. To that end, he runs away to New York where he encounters Robin Williams playing Bono playing Fagan, if you imagine such a thing. Meanwhile, Terrence Howard, another actor who can reduce you to tears with a blink, is the welfare officer attempting to track the boy down.
There are plenty of things to marvel at here. Dainty and earnest and sui generis all over, August Rush is swept along by a grand, hypnotic score that takes in gospel, rock and classical. The sleek composed cinematography of John Mathieson transforms New York into a wholly engrossing Dickensian demimonde. Though quite its own thing, Ms. Sheridan, who has already proved an authority on odd states of mind in Disco Pigs and Patterns, is assured with her tone. It may not suit car-chase junkies but for those who doubted that magical realism could ever sit right in mainstream cinema we say ‘Behold’.