Jon Brion has probably never been a 17-year-old girl, and yet there’s something to the loose, swinging compositions he’s put together for Greta Gerwig’s directorial debut Lady Bird that indicates a grasp of what it’s like to be young, seething, and entirely dissatisfied with your surroundings. Gerwig’s heroine, whose name is Christine but who goes by Lady Bird as a bid for an identity beyond the material conditions of her lower-middle-class family in Sacramento, Calif., introduces herself within the first minutes of the film by flinging herself out of a moving car during an argument with her mother about why she must go to college on the East Coast. You see her mom scream and then there’s a cut to a pink cast with the words “FUCK YOU MOM” firmly scrawled on it. It’s quite an entrance, and a movie with a heavier hand might have thrown something punk-rebellious in the soundtrack, or at the very least something with a snare-driven backbeat and an electric guitar. Not Lady Bird. Christine’s not punk; she's just exasperated and understimulated, searching tirelessly for a way out of the cage she sees around her life.
In the past decade or so, movies about quirky high schoolers have thankfully aged out of their twee phase. Lady Bird has far more in common with Kenneth Lonergan’s 2011 stunner Margaret than it does with Juno; it has gravitas, and it assigns more meaning to the looking than the finding, the neat endings, the easy answers. With a piano, string, wind ensemble, and light percussion, Brion’s score deftly mirrors Lady Bird’s existential ambling. His notes barely glance off the piano keys, and there always seems to be a spring in the music’s step, leaving just enough room for the film’s actors to carry the real weight. This isn’t the kind of soundtrack that tells you exactly how to feel; Lady Bird isn’t that kind of movie. Its magic happens in the space between the characters, the tensions and betrayals and bruises they inflict on each other and how they propel each other forward. There’s an arc to the film—it doesn’t just throw its characters in a spin-cycle of increasing absurdity, like the Brion-scored I Heart Huckabees—but it’s a subtle, emotional one. Lady Bird’s big quest is just to fly across the country to college in New York without destroying every meaningful relationship she’s ever had along the way.
Lady Bird is one of Brion’s more unassuming scores (you wouldn’t necessarily be able to place its theme instantaneously if you heard it out in the wild), but it’s also one of his least cynical. Even the gut-mangling Charlie Kaufman movie Synecdoche, New York had its sneering moments with wildly sarcastic Brion themes to accompany them. Lady Bird’s score stays in a consistent mode, never pushing beyond a light touch, which is fitting enough for a film set in Sacramento, a place whose anodyne pleasantness threatens to swallow its heroine alive. And still in all the sunniness lurks the sense that something is happening. Something is pushing Christine toward a precipice that she’s both terrified and eager to scale. A bass drum pounds insistently on “Maybe”; piano keys strike up through the woodwinds like mountains through fog on “Leaving”; there’s a track called “Hope” and a track called “More Hope” and one “Hope Against Hope” and then, finally, the minor key conclusion, “Hope?”
Set in the early 2000s, right around the time Jon Brion started composing for directors like Paul Thomas Anderson who prefer to see the world askew, Lady Bird easily could have aimed for millennial nostalgia with its music cues. Rather than have Christine listen to the American Analog Set or early Sufjan Stevens, though, Gerwig pivots her emotional growth around a ubiquitous Dave Matthews Band single. Brion follows her lead. The way he colors the film’s world leaves it wide open, with room enough for gentle movement and subtle triumphs. His light, playful motifs buoy the narrative without crowding it, and help paint a rich, fulfilling portrait of a girl on the edge, ready to fly.
