In 2006, while the Irish writer-director John Carney was promoting his indie musical film "Once," he fell hard for New York City. Literally. "Cycling around, going the wrong way down one-way streets, I got the feel of living here," Mr. Carney said, adding that when he crashed that bike, he admired the efficiency with which New Yorkers stopped "for the minimal amount of time to make sure I wasn't dead."
When the time came to research his new film, "Begin Again" (opening July 4), which is set in New York, Mr. Carney decided to cycle again. "I bought a bike the first day I was writing my script," he said. "It got stolen on the last day of editing."
Like "Once," Mr. Carney's new movie is an intimate musical about the artistic collaboration between a man and a woman, shot on the city streets. Whereas his breakthrough film followed two struggling musicians who fell in love in Dublin, "Begin Again" begins in New York, where Dan (Mark Ruffalo), in the throes of a midlife crisis and a failing marriage, has just been fired from the once-powerful record label he helped start.
Drunk in an East Village bar at the end of a long night, Dan hears a singer-songwriter, Gretta (Keira Knightley), perform a song that rekindles his love for the music business that is crumbling around him. Gretta is sick of New York and the pop machine that is turning her boyfriend into both a rock star and a narcissist. But Dan persuades Gretta to stay and make an album with him. Soon the two are recording with a live band in the five boroughs' back alleyways and side streets, in rowboats and on rooftops, amid the roar of traffic, the shouting of school kids and the shrieks of sirens.
"I guess the film dream city is Los Angeles, but music is my first love," said Mr. Carney, a former bassist in the Frames, an Irish rock band. "For me, the dream place for music was always New York."
Yes, wary New York filmgoers, Mr. Carney's film, which was the closing-night selection of the Tribeca Film Festival, is the latest entry in the precarious movie genre that might be called "a love letter to New York." Such films are usually motivated by the best intentions and nearly always prone to tourist cliché, but occasionally, in the right hands, they click. Mr. Carney pulled off a heartfelt romance before, with "'Once." His new film avoids romantic cliché by roughing up its naked emotion and sincere musical numbers with spontaneous urban naturalism.
"It's not really a love letter to New York," Mr. Ruffalo said. "It's more like a Charles Bukowski lo ve poem to New York. It has that gritty reality of Cassavetes films. And his characters are messy and troubled. John keeps a stink on them, so they don't get too cheesy or sappy."
Catherine Keener and Hailee Steinfeld play Dan's estranged wife and his daughter. Cee Lo Green, as a pop star, and Yasiin Bey (Mos Def), as a music executive, lend credibility to the film's portrayal of the music business. Gretta's boyfriend, Dave, an indie singer-songwriter on the verge of celebrity, is played by the pop star Adam Levine, of Maroon 5 and "The Voice."
"John wanted me because I'd been through some version of this in the past," Mr. Levine said, noting that he empathized with the idea of an ambitious young man who had let the thrill of beating the lon g odds of the music business go to his head.
"There was a time in my life when I was a lot more like this dude than I am now," he said. "Onstage, you're God's gift. A larger-than-life persona? That's the job. The problem is when that guy's in a bar, still thinking he's the greatest."
The stars and songwriters of "Once," Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova, won an Oscar for best original song and contributed to the stage adaptation, which won the Tony for best musical. For "Begin Again," Mr. Hansard was co-writer on one song, Mr. Carney contributed to two, and the rest of the songwriting was led by Gregg Alexander, the New Radicals frontman, mining a similar vein of sincerity.
Like "Once," Mr. Carney's new film follows musicians, for whom breaking into song is realistic. "The idea behind 'Once,' " Mr. Carney said, "was, what if you made a film that had all of the joy of those musicals but it plays out without the apparent artifice or fakery?"
Also, as he did with "Once," Mr. Carney shot on city streets. "It's the very opposite of traditional filmmaking where you control everything," Mr. Carney said. "I'm a firm believer in Robert Altman, who said that filmmaking is a string of accidents. You have to look at every person honking their horn as contributing," rather than being an annoyance.
"That's a much better way to live in a city, anyway," he said.
Mr. Carney filmed "Once" in his native Dublin with a minuscule budget, relative unknowns and raw production values, but this time he was working with recognizable stars and film studio support in a world capital of paparazzi.
"I'd been doing a lot of work that was much more stylized, and I liked the idea of going in a more naturalistic direction," Ms. Knightley said by email, though she noted that it was often "hard with 30 lenses in your face."
Mr. Carney said that Ms. Knightley, who sings all of her songs herself with a quiet confidence, was less accustomed to improvising in uncontrolled environments than Mr. Ruffalo was. "Keira was definitely the ice to the fire of people like Mark and I, who love that sort of stuff," he said. "But her character was a little uptight and in a place where she had just been stung and wasn't open. The different approaches worked when we put them together, like a kind of jazz."
To avoid the familiar romantic tropes of New York, Mr. Carney played up Gretta and Dan's differences, kept them at a distance and largely avoided shooting scenes in predictable postcard locations.
"It's not the glamour shots that you see in so many movies, whether that was East Chinatown or the Upper West Side, TriBeCa or a subway platform," Mr. Ruffalo said. "You see a New York that's actually recognizable, as someone who just walks ar ound the city."
Yet the movie is chockablock with rapturous vignettes, which may threaten to melt the heart of even the most cynical New Yorker. Mr. Carney, who also wrote the film, said the trick to pulling off such scenes was relying on his own experience.
"You know, life is full of sweet moments," Mr. Carney said. "So, in a movie, you'd better be sure you lived that moment and felt it authentically and that it's not just a cute idea that you had."
In the film's most overtly euphoric montage, Mr. Ruffalo and Ms. Knightley share an earbud splitter, an iPod and two sets of headphones as they prowl through the city at night, queuing up songs for each other, from Times Square to the East Village. Mr. Carney said the scene was inspired by a recent New Year's Eve.
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"In Dublin, the bells ring out at midnight in Christ Church Cathedral," he said. "About 11:30, I grabbed two pairs of headphones and a splitter, and my girlfriend and I had this beautiful, uplifting walk through town, going from Frank Sinatra to some obscure '80s band to Joy Division and Stevie Wonder, smiling like an idiot. If that was just cute on the page, it could easily have been über-sweet and inauthentic. But it came from this genuine place."
Mr. Carney's love letter to New York certainly seems to come from a genuine place. If it had a postscript, it might read like this: One day, while shooting in Greenwich Village, he was on his cellphone, trying to explain the allure of the city to his father in Ireland.
"He asks me what's it really like and, just at that moment, I notice this homeless guy urinating into a polystyrene cup behind the bus stop," Mr. Carney said. "I put it out of mind, continued talking. Then he walked by and threw the half-full cup in the trash can, and a tiny droplet went in my eye."
It's exactly the kind of anecdote Mr. Carney had referred to, which might be too pat for fiction but has the undeniable ring of truth.
"I thought, that's New York," he said. "I suppose you know you're a New Yorker when you get urine in your eye."
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