Where to begin? Perhaps with the title sequence which shows an 11-year-old boy, Evan (Freddie Highmore), in an ecstatic state as he stands in a field of windblown high grass listening to a symphony of musical sounds that only he—and we—can hear. “Where I grew up,” Evan's voiceover says, “they tried to stop me from hearing the music.” He grew up—or rather, he is growing up—in an orphanage in upstate New York.
Flash back to 12 years earlier, when a young man, Louis (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), and a shy young woman, Lyla (Keri Russell), serendipitously encounter each other on a rooftop overlooking Washington Square in New York's Greenwich Village. They immediately fall into a romantic trance, making love and sleeping the night away cuddled together under the stars. In the morning Lyla flees, and Louis is left knowing nothing about her, not even her last name. Nor does she know his. We know, of course, that she's a concert cellist and that he's a rock musician and that they both have out-of-town gigs to get to. However, so deep is the love that blossomed during their one-night stand, Lyla and Louis separately fall into a lovesick melancholy which, over the next dozen or so years, robs them of their need to perform the music they love. Lyla becomes a music teacher in Chicago, and Louis evolves into a successful businessman in San Francisco.
Whoa. Let's back up here: Predictably, that one night of lovemaking left Lyla pregnant, and after she's involved in a late-term auto accident, her stern father (who's concerned about her career) tells her the baby is “gone”—i.e., dead. Well, of course, the baby, our Evan, is alive and living in that awful orphanage, where he's bullied and teased for talking crazy about the musical sounds he hears in his head. Evan keeps a positive attitude, though, because he's convinced that through the music, he'll someday be reunited with his parents. A daring escape from the orphanage brings him to New York City where, alone and penniless, he falls under the tutelage of a weirdo named Wizard (Robin Williams), who has taken possession of an abandoned Harlem theatre which is home to a colony of homeless urchins who give Wizard the proceeds they get from playing music on the street. Again the music!
The minute Evan encounters a guitar, he begins playing it—in a most unconventional and startling way. Wizard's no fool, he knows he's got a moneymaker in young Evan, and he doesn't waste a second in exploiting the kid's talents. The first order of business, says the Wizard, is to change Evan's name—to August Rush. (Why? Because Wizard sees a sign saying: “Avoid the August rush to the beach….” Right.) Before long, August/Evan wanders away from Wizard and into a church where a gospel choir is practicing, and where he's introduced, for the first time, to sheet music and learns how those squiggly notes correspond to the keys on a piano. Within minutes, August is scribbling out symphonies and, apparently within the hour, he's at a church organ playing them!
The musical miracles don't end there—not in this egregiously self-indulgent and mawkish fairy tale. The film's structure only emphasizes its problems: The parallel but separate lives of Lyla, Louis and Evan are methodically chronicled in a gratingly annoying tit-for-tat tandem until—heaven be praised!—the three main characters finally come together in an absolute doozy of a climax. (Would you believe the pre-pubescent August conducts his own symphony at a huge New York Philharmonic concert in Central Park? And this is just after Lyla, his birth mother, makes a comeback appearance on the same stage? Also after his dad, who doesn't even yet know he's a dad.....oh, forget it.)
Amazingly, the performances in August Rush are exceptionally good; Russell and Rhys Meyers make a serious effort to elevate the screenplay's sentimental pap, and a few times they succeed. Terrence Howard has a minor but effective role as a child-services counselor who tries to help Evan, and Robin Williams once again does his own daffy thing. The acting standout, however, is Freddie Highmore in an astounding portrayal of a musical prodigy. He makes you believe that music—grand, soaring strings to wildly rhythmic pop-rock—is always swirling in the air around us, always accessible to those who know how to listen.
To grudgingly give August Rush some due, the film's outrageous plot is incidental to its intended message—which is about the potent romance, the soul-filling, mind-and-body-engulfing power of music. If this were the ’60s, the word of mouth on this movie would be to go see it only after your brain's emotional receptors have been, to put it euphemistically, artificially enhanced. In that state, even the insultingly silly bits might seem groovy.