The Something Great about Someone Great
By: Ria Dhingra
Warning: Slight spoilers ahead.
After being named one of Variety’s Top Ten TV writer’s in 2016, Jennifer Kaitlyn Robinson seems to have been working nonstop. She released her directorial debut on Netflix in 2019, wrote for and served as a consulting producer for a series of television projects and (most recently) co-wrote Thor: Love and Thunder, released earlier this past month.
Robinson’s writing has often focused on the topics of women navigating the world around them: maturing, finding love and (more importantly) finding themselves. She relies upon cliches and tropes in a way that’s comfortable, familiar, while also taking care to subvert the conventions that produce tropes in the first place. Take her 2019 directorial debut, a film that opens with a breakup—including drunk texts, tears, “green juice mimosas,” slightly underdeveloped supporting characters and a montage where outfits are swapped at least six times. Despite including all the right ingredients for a typical romantic comedy, Robinson instead produces a film that starts the way it ends: with tears. It’s a film that’s less about a relationship growing apart and more about a woman growing up, a woman deciding to take the terrifying risk of loosening ties in order to establish herself.
Based on that previous paragraph, it’s quite clear that, in 2022, I’m still thinking about (and now writing about) Robinson’s 2019 film: Someone Great.
Here’s the basic synopsis: Jenny, a music journalist, gets her dream job working for Rolling Stone and is moving to San Francisco—soon. For the last decade of her life, she’s been living in New York, close to the people she loves most: her two best friends and her boyfriend, Nate. Upon getting dumped by Nate, Jenny and her friends decide to take on New York for one final girls night. (The film also features RuPaul in a guest role of a drug dealer/that-one-friend-who-provides-unsolicited-relationship-advice. In my opinion, that’s a pretty good selling point.)
Yet, the reason I keep coming back to this film is its use of music, both the score itself and how much care Robinson obviously put into curating it.
Released in 2017, Lizzo’s song “Truth Hurts” plays in the opening 20 minutes of the film—a clip that was used in the trailer of the movie. In 2019, the sleeper hit was re-released as a single, in large part, due to increased popularity from the movie.
I think that alone embodies what’s so great about the film and its soundtrack. They’re interconnected; the film acts like a living, breathing*, piece of music journalism. The song choices are varied without coming off as pretentious, showcasing artists that Robsinson believed Jenny would write about, embodying her character. In fact, the title of the film is an homage to the LCD Soundsystem track of the same name. A quick scan of the lyrics of “Someone Great” is the perfect way to understand exactly what Jenny is feeling at the start of the movie.
A good playlist, a good soundtrack, does a lot of things. It melds together disjointed fragments of albums to produce a new narrative. The soundtrack of Someone Great is charismatic, joyful and comforting, a tribute to the narrative storytelling capacities of music and a demonstration of Robinson’s talent in utilizing this narrative capacity to tell her own.
It’s important to note here that Robinson was once a music journalist herself. Someone Great proves that she truly “gets music,” which is more than knowing how to write about tone, style, stage presence, or inserting obscure references to other artists in an attempt to build ethos. Rather, interesting music journalism, appreciation for music, is being able to capture in writing how music makes you feel. Robinson does so by using songs as transitions, relying on them as narrative tools to insert flashbacks of Jenny’s relationship with Nate in a nonlinear retelling. For example, instead of writing how Vampire Weekend’s “Mansard Roof” sounds as if it is bustling with sonic, potential energy, Robinson uses it to travel back in time to the party where Jenny and Nate first meet.
Robinson relies upon lyrics to establish the emotional foreground of her settings, letting viewers see into Jenny’s heart without providing dialogue or literal exposition.
Lorde’s “Supercut”** is played in a montage that shows the origin and demise of Jenny’s nine year relationship. “All the magic we gave off. All the love we had and lost…Ours are the moments I play in the dark.” Twin Shadow’s “Saturdays” serves as the score for Jenny and Nate’s first, lighthearted, hookup. “When we dance in the dark in the room where it all gets real. I know you know how it feels.” Mitski’s “Your Best American Girl” crescendos as Jenny desperately tries to make it work with Nate, physically, as the very logistics of their relationship falls apart. “I guess I couldn't help trying to be your best American girl. You're the one. You're all I ever wanted. I think I'll regret this.” Lil Kim’s “Jump Off” is used as the backdrop for the classic rom-com trope of let’s-try-as-many-outfits-as-we-can-until-we-find-the-right-one sequence. “I been gone for a minute now I'm back at the jump off…In the graveyard is where you get dumped off.”
Jenny tearfully sings Selena’s “Dreaming Of You” into a string cheese, at a bodega, as she reminisces about late night adventures. She locks eyes with Nate, mouthing ‘I love you’ across a crowded Sony Hall to Jeesie Reyez’s “Great One.” She plays back the positives of her relationship, the memories she will hold onto forever, to the opening piano notes of Ryn Weaver’s “Reasons Not To Die.”
Robinson also reveals her own lyricism in Jenny’s poem—a frantic, drunkenly scrawled plea to Nate that transitions into a realization of acceptance.
“Do you think I can have one more kiss? I’ll find closure on your lips and then I’ll go. Maybe, also one more breakfast, one more lunch and one more dinner. I’ll be full and happy and we can part. But in between meals, maybe we can lie in bed one more time. One more prolonged moment where time suspends indefinitely as I rest my head on your chest. My hope, is if we add up the one-mores it will equal a lifetime, and I never have to get to the part where I have to let you go. But that’s not real, is it? There are no more, one-mores. I met you when everything was new and exciting and the possibilities of the world seemed endless. And they still are, for you, for me, but not for us. Somewhere between then and now, here and there, I guess we didn’t just grow apart, we grew up. When something breaks, and the pieces are big enough, you can fix it. I guess sometimes, things don’t break, they shatter. But when you let the light in, shattered glass will glitter. And in those moments, when the pieces catch the sun, I’ll remember just how beautiful it was. Just how beautiful it will always be, because it was us, and we are magic——forever.”
Like a good pop song, a good playlist, this film and its soundtrack cover all the most popular bases. It’s general enough where any audience member, any listener, can find a theme that’s relatable: heartbreak, commitment, female friendships, growing up and departing proximity to loved ones. Yet, Someone Great manages to transcend its mass-appeal, scratching past the surface towards complexity often enough that viewers (like me) can be left over-analyzing the film three years after its release. It’s like playing back a favorite song over and over, without any rational justification, just because it “feels right.”
That’s good music. Light and sometimes profound. For billboard charts and indie critics. For the artist and their fans. No song, no album, can do it all. But a playlist, a soundtrack, can. The amalgamation of bringing together trap-pop sleeper hits, emotional ballads, indie favorites and 90’s throwbacks allows Robinson to bring her story to life. And there’s something really beautiful, something great, in that.
*Robinson credit’s Taylor Swift’s “Clean” as inspiration for the movie. In response, Swift credits Someone Great as motivation for her song “Death By A Thousand Cuts”
**”Supercut” inspired the storyline of the movie, existing in the soundtrack before the premise was even written.