Dirt Road to Lafayette

If you love zydeco music then this movie is a great platform for it and you're going to love it ... the performers are clearly all very accomplished players and singers. Songs are presented in their entirety and there's a very interesting range which at one point shifts into 12 bar blues and at others references and showcases the lead character's and his extended family's Scottish origins. So 10/10 for the music. I also liked the premise that the loss of an older sister and mother had led to father and son leaving their Scottish homeland and looking for comfort from their extended family in the deep South ... and the son rediscovering his love of the accordian through a chance encounter with a local legend, playing in her own backyard, in a small Southern town. What the movie also tries to convey though is how father and son are coping differently with their loss ... the son using the music and the affirmation he receives from the musicians he meets and plays with to edge him out of mourning his loss. The father seems not to understand or is unwilling to acknowledge or encourage this. But the reasons for this are not really explored. There are long faces and silences every time they are alone together, but these only go so far in exploring how the loss has affected how they feel around each other, and in the company of their family. You may disagree. It certainly leaves you free to put your own interpretation on the father son story theme.. Maybe he was much closer to his mother ... likely she was the musical one and the reawakening of the son's love for music only makes the father's attempts to deal with his own grief the harder.