When I first heard about this sleeper indie hit, I thought for sure that it wouldn’t be my cup of tea. For one thing, the mere label of “indie” conjures images in my mind of a bunch of emo hipsters trying too hard to be deep. Second, the label “musical” made me fear that the aforementioned hipsters were going to burst into song in some horribly contrived attempt to be clever and tongue-in-cheek. Granted, my initial preconceptions weren’t entirely inaccurate. Yet, Once still managed to win me over with its quirky cuteness and strange sense of optimism.

The film is hard to describe to someone who hasn’t already seen it. There isn’t really a story. If anything, I looked at it as a combination of something like an extended music video and a rockumentary, even though it wasn’t quite either. The film simply follows one heartbroken musician and his chance encounter with an attractive immigrant who also shares a passion for music. I’ve seen the film described by many as a love story, and I think it is that. But as I saw it, the love wasn’t so much between the two main characters as it was for the music. The way the movie was filmed with the cameras zoomed in on the action from a distance let the interactions between characters and bystanders look completely organic. In so doing, it brought to the fore the awkwardness of everyday life. Some reviewers have described these moments as “bad acting,” but I read them as being more true to life than pretty much any other film or television show I’ve ever seen. And yet, these moments contrast with the only times when the characters look completely comfortable: when they are performing, both for each other or in the recording studio.

While I do think the label “musical” doesn’t aptly fit what this film does, it is undeniable that the driving force behind the film is the music. But it isn’t because the film is a showcase for catchy songs. The palpable energy that the songs inject into the film came, in my opinion, more from the cathartic role the songs play in the lives of the characters. This can be seen early on in the film where the main character seems only able to talk about what went wrong in his former relationship through singing the cute but also revealing “Broken Hearted Hoover Sucker Guy” song on the bus. But the climax comes when their awkward (and even antagonistic) relationships melt away to become an almost surreal experience of familial togetherness as their music achieves unexpected sublimity in the recording studio. And while I could easily see someone walking out of the film still thinking it was about a bunch of emo hipsters trying too hard to be deep, I nonetheless found myself sharing in the characters’ happiness, if only for a few moments.

I think what was crucial in keeping this film from looking like a trite tale of misfits finding a home á la Breakfast Club was the lack of a pointed narrative to drive the film. There was no ending anymore than there was a real beginning, and I could believe that what I was seeing was in some sense an origin story of a band whose success or failure is utterly irrelevant. The movie plays like a memory–a snapshot in time of a particularly happy moment in the lives of these characters. But it was a moment that was clearly ephemeral, and to me, that made it believable. This isn’t a Hollywood-type movie where every line of dialog is perfect and the story move inexorably toward a tidy end. It was more like a home video of a slightly faded memory, none the worse for the wear, but tinged with the bittersweetness of ‘what-could-have-been.’ In other words, a lot like real life… but with a soundtrack.