August Rush

Kirsten Sheridan treats coincidence as a rule rather than a flaw: nobody in this story searches and finds, music pulls them toward one another. The cast learned their instruments. They trained for more than three months; Keri Russell started on scales with two teachers and worked up to the Elgar Cello Concerto that carries the climax, while Freddie Highmore put three to six hours a week into little other than the pieces he had to play. The guitarist Kaki King hand doubled for him, but only on the virtuoso passages added to the schedule too late for Highmore to learn. Mark Mancina composed backwards, writing the theme for the finale first and deriving the earlier cues from it. The fragments the boy tries out on the street are therefore pieces of a reunion that has not happened yet, and the score tells you where the film is going before the plot does. Its single Academy Award nomination also came from the music: Raise It Up, written by Impact Repertory Theatre, was nominated for Original Song and lost to Falling Slowly from Once. A good fit if you accept meetings arranged by musical logic instead of plausibility. Not for anyone who wants the runaway boy’s New York to look like the real one, since the film keeps that city storybook.