God Help the Girl is a long-in-the-making film project from Stuart Murdoch, front man of the beloved Scottish indie-pop group Belle & Sebastian. It originally began life in 2009 as a side project of his: a collection of songs about young women growing up, which he oversaw while delegating the singing duties to a number of female vocalists. Thanks to trouble securing financing (he eventually resorted to crowd-funding), the film accompanying the album is only arriving now, five years later. Its narrative condenses the multiplicity of voices from the album into a single female protagonist named Eve (Emily Browning), who's fascinating and troubled enough (in the manner of the characters in B&S songs) to be the focal point of a bittersweet musical; unfortunately, the plot itself is both a little too shapeless and too indebted to the usual story beats of indie drama to be as captivating. Still, God Help the Girl is charming enough in a low-key way, capturing the highs and lows of young love and the desire to make transcendent pop music.
When we first meet her, Eve is a patient at a psychiatric hospital, being treated for anorexia nervosa. She sneaks out one night to see a concert, and there encounters both Anton (Pierre Boulanger), a charismatic rocker with sex appeal to burn, and James (Olly Alexander), a nerdy music geek fronting a much less polished band. Well, briefly fronting is more like it -- the group breaks up on-stage after he and the drummer get into a slapping match. Soon enough, Eve befriends James and rents a room in his flat (while seeing Anton the sly). James is obsessed with creating a perfect pop song, and he's certain that Eve's heavenly voice is the key to doing so. They recruit bored rich girl Cassie (Hannah Murray) as the third member of their new band, christened God Help the Girl, and spend a magical summer together perfecting their craft and hanging out.
The film might have been made on the cheap, but Murdoch does a good job of never letting that become too obvious; his favorite technique is to use long shots of the trio exploring the Scottish outdoors, relying on voice-over work to hide the fact that he didn't have enough coverage to include close-ups of the characters speaking. And he's a better visual thinker than you'd expect from a first-time filmmaker: Everything you need to know about James' relative uncoolness is summed up in the way Murdoch abruptly cuts from Anton working the crowd to James awkwardly warming up.
Spending time with Eve, Cassie, and James is plenty of fun at first, and their dialogue (also courtesy of Murdoch, who wrote the script) is an amusing distillation of band politics, musical wonkiness, and generalized dorm-room-style philosophizing. However, even a hangout movie needs something of a plot, and that eventually leads to the expected scenes involving Anton's caddishness and Eve spiraling deeper into depression. The film rallies for a coda that's genuinely touching, but it still feels like a missed opportunity that a band as idiosyncratic as Belle & Sebastian -- known for crafting songs with the sharply defined characters and rich details of a good short story -- would be involved with a movie that can't break away from indie-film formula.
There's also the matter of the songs themselves: It's usually left ambiguous as to whether what we're seeing is something real (like the band rehearsing) or a heightened version of reality. Either way, though, they don't really serve the function that tunes typically do in musicals, letting the characters declare their feelings that they wouldn't dare speak out loud. You could easily cut the musical numbers from the movie without impacting the plot or our understanding of the characters ("Pretty Eve in the Tub," James' serenade to Eve, is a charmer, but we hardly need to be told that he has a crush on her). At the same time, though, these songs are good, but far from Belle & Sebastian's best material. God Help the Girl almost feels like a coming-of-age tale and a pop musical were stapled together, with little thought as to how to integrate them.
Yet even if that's the case, they would still be a touching coming-of-age tale and an entertaining musical. God Help the Girl falls short of the greatness of Belle & Sebastian's best albums, but it remains a charming ode to the power of pop music and its ability to heal personal wounds.