ZingDash

The tale here is of two title characters whose paths of different starting points intersect, creating a symbiotic relationship that eventually shuffles into passion. Jackie (Katherine Heigl) is a once-famous musician who now lives with little money in her hometown of Ogden, Utah, while embroiled in ugly phone chats about custody of her daughter Lia (Emily Alyn Lind) with her estranged husband. When walking through downtown one day, she observes a rugged musician named Ryan (Ben Barnes) busking away on a folk tune, and notices that he only does covers. “Ain’t got nothin’ to say?” she chides him.  

While this moment might technically be their meet-cute, it’s only when Jackie is knocked down by a comically slow-moving truck that the two connect. Through his charm and handy knowledge of roofing, he sticks around a few days with Jackie and her mother (Sheryl Lee). In a short amount of time, the two inspire each other: Jackie continues to push Ryan to write his own songs, while she finds comfort in his detachment from the types of things that can hold a human being down, which motivates her to stand up to her husband. After the script establishes an overall environment of hardship, it’s only then that Jackie & Ryan explore their romantic connection, which turns out to be the script’s least intriguing facet. 

Barnes & Heigl take their characters the distance provided them by the story, which is not very far. Barnes has a weird gloss in his hobo-ness that renders him a boring fictional being fairly quickly, unchanged even when movie begins to idolize him. And as her character seeks divorce, Heigl spends half of her time acting with phones, and the other half with a plain stoicism. The two are both fine in the film, together and separately, but their chemistry is emblematically unspectacular. 

Trying only sometimes to not be the Nicholas Sparks answer to "Inside Llewyn Davis," “Jackie & Ryan” is constantly conflicted with its levels of earnestness. Ryan’s world of wandering (homelessness) is given ample time for presentation, but like Barnes’ GQ drifter looks, is too tidy. Or, Jackie’s battle for custody is an intriguing issue for a character to deal with (and to be inspired by a folk singer, nonetheless), but is given such a fleeting representation and resolution. Even the film’s idea of romance seeks to scrub Sparks’ small-town arcs of their rampant third act deaths, or tedious separations until one fixes the other, but the heart of this film grows weaker as its meant to go bigger. It becomes a companionship story of two people who can have each other, we don’t really care. Emblematic to how slippery this movie can be, “Jackie & Ryan” aims true where most other musician-led films don’t - in its scenes of performance, Heigl is actually singing, and Barnes is actually playing. 

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