Janie Jones

Ethan Brand is a rock musician out on tour. The band is falling apart, the record is not selling, and he moves between drink and drugs. One night before a show a woman comes to the door with a thirteen-year-old girl and says the girl is his. The woman checks into rehab and leaves the child behind. Ethan has to keep touring, so Janie is in the van. The girl writes songs, and she sings better than her father. David M. Rosenthal directs the American film; a hundred and fourteen minutes, with Alessandro Nivola as Ethan and Abigail Breslin as Janie, and Elisabeth Shue and Peter Stormare in the cast. Both leads sing their own songs. It is a road film, and the music is not decoration: it is how two people say the thing they cannot say.