Martin Hynes, Jena Malone talk 'Go-Getter;' Malone starts label

As a piece of film to listen to, "The Go-Getter" works splendidly.

Primarily known as the movie that birthed She & Him -- the pairing of actress Zooey Deschanel and musician M. Ward -- "The Go-Getter" succeeds as a cinematic soundtrack, shading characters with rock 'n' roll, and capturing a certain type of rock 'n' roll isolation not often seen on film.

Part road trip film, and part dissertation on loneliness, "The Go-Getter" begins with main character Mercer (Lou Taylor Pucci) deciding to hijack a car and long for a long-lost half brother. And while he has a mission of sorts (to inform his half-brother of the passing of their mother), what finally pushes him over the edge is the sight of a band.

It isn't long before he voices his discontent: "Did you ever wonder if people started bands to make the rest of us feel like crap?"

While the warm atmospheres of M. Ward -- the singer/songwriter's soft arrangements and old-fashioned sounds comes off as if they're being beamed from another era -- are enough to make any wannabe musician insecure, director Martin Hynes captures music's more solitary attributes.

"There’s nothing cooler than being in a band in high school," Hynes told Extended Play. "Even people who don’t want to be in bands know that in the back of their heads. I thought it would just be a great unspoken sort of symbol, how it sucks to just be on the outside of something. I knew that scene would be good, when Mercer is just standing there and all these cool guys are in this dome and are all playing music."

Jena Malone, who has a supporting role in bad girl Joely, later echoed Hynes' sentiments. Her character isn't on screen much, but when she is, Malone comes with a strikingly different soundtrack than anything else in the film. Her Joely moves to bluesy rock band the Black Keys and the more rambunctious side of the Replacements. With M. Ward gracing most of Mercer's scenes in the car, the drastic shift in music serves to illustrate the distance between the two.

"Music makes you feel like you’re a part of something," Malone said. "But then when music becomes the actualization of music, a band creating in a space before you, then you feel the presence -- or the lack thereof -- of being a part of something."

Throughout the film, Mercer forms a relationship with Kate (Deschanel). It's largely implausible, as Mercer made off with her car, to name but one reason, but their relationship exists as more of a dream than anything grounded in reality.

When it works, it does so in part because of M. Ward's music, whose songs possesses a dense sense of nostalgia that makes the music feel lived in and comfortable even if it's being heard for the first time. Listen to the film's end-credits cut, a cover recorded by Ward and Deschanel of Linda and Richard Thompson's "When I Get to the Border," below.

"That sense of timelessness is certainly there," Hynes said. "There’s an ambiguity that lends itself to the same thing as the movie. The ending is kind of ambiguous. The characters aren’t all neatly tied up. There’s a sense that hopefully the universe kind of opens up when you leave things a little less said. A lot of Matt’s words are like that."

The Times' Carina Chocano eloquently writes in her review that Deschanel's "Kate is the kind of girl who orders a Big Mac without the beef patties, which is to say the kind of girl only an arty, alienated person younger than 17 finds attractive or even plausible." I wouldn't necessarily disagree, but I do take issue with her age limit. Anyone who still has the ability to fall in love with a pop song can easily buy the romanticism "The Go-Getter" is selling, and that seems to be the point.

As an aside: While the film gets mentioned alongside the wonderful She & Him record, which was written about here, Deschanel isn't the only star in the film with a bit of music in her background. Malone has dabbled with a band before (Jena Malone and her Bloodstains), she recently started up her own label, There Was An Old Woman Records, where she's recording with her new, less abrasive, more stripped-down project, the Shoe.

The Bloodstains -- a sort of art-punk project -- are no more, said Malone. "It didn’t seem right to me," Malone said. "I started a new project, and the reason it exists is because I went through that first stage of having other musicians come and play the music instead of me myself becoming a musician and becoming better at what I do."

Malone will make available a five-song CD from the Shoe on June 9 (you can get the songs digitally now), and will play shows in New York at as-yet-unannounced locations from June 27-29. Check her MySpace page for updates, but the expect the gigs to occur in odd locations, such as "street corners and under freeway overpasses," said Malone.

Photos courtesy Peach Arch

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[fancastfan]

Hey Jena fans – check out this scoop: if you are in NY you have a treat - Jena and The Shoe are doing a secret set of shows in NYC this weekend (Fri, Sat, Sun.)
http://dish.fancast.com/2008/06/jena_malones_shoe_performs_nap.html