Adapted from a novel by Nick Hornby, Juliet, Naked deftly shifts the perspective of Hornby’s perennial themes – music, obsessive male fandom – and looks at them through the eyes of the long-suffering woman who has to live with them. For Annie (Rose Byrne), the charm of the boyish enthusiasms of her partner, Duncan (Chris O’Dowd), has long since worn off. Duncan is obsessed with Tucker Crowe, an enigmatic rocker who vanished from the public eye after having released one slightly drippy-sounding album. But even as Annie’s relationship crumbles, she strikes up a transatlantic email friendship with none other than Tucker himself (Ethan Hawke).
It takes a lightness of directorial touch and buckets of crackling onscreen chemistry to pull off a premise this contrived. Fortunately Peretz, who has directed episodes of Girls, is up to the task – a chaotic hospital scene, in which Tucker is confronted with the results of a lifetime of feckless relationships, is a venomous pleasure. And Byrne and Hawke, both easygoing, naturalistic performers at their best when they barely seem to be acting, have an utterly persuasive connection.
