Harper and Charlie meet cute, or perhaps re-meet cute in “Charlie Harper,” a romantic drama starring Emilia Jones and Nick Robinson as a young couple recalling their love in the wake of its apparent demise. “Are you a nostalgic person?” Harper (Jones) asks an unseen listener early on.
Directed by Mac Eldridge and Tom Dean (from a script by Dean), the nonlinear film takes place in an era bathed in wistfulness: Barack Obama has just won the presidency, and that night, Charlie (Robinson) and two friends head to a party. Harper is there, fiddling with an iPod. When Charlie reminds Harper they’ve met, she draws a blank. To share the twists of what becomes their first night in a five-year relationship would smudge one of the film’s more winsome moments.
The movie’s layering of his-and-her accounts (as well as editing by Sam Levy) resists simple past tense. And so, Harper dreams of becoming a chef. Charlie appears happy to work at a screen-printing business, to spend time with friends, to tipple. In New Orleans, the sinews of their fondness gets stretched. Is he happy, really? Is she? And what about his drinking?
There is much that is tenderly grown-up in this drama that tangles with diverging ambitions and the economics of work. Yet there’s something wanting in the insularity.
When Harper admits her own attraction to nostalgia, she also adds, “I wonder what purpose it serves.” That the viewer might wonder the same of this warmly crafted film strikes its own note of melancholy.
Charlie Harper Rated R for language, some sexual content and drug use. Running time: 1 hour 42 minutes. In theaters.
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