THEY’D better stock some insulin along with the popcorn in theaters showing the extremely sticky and moist musical fantasy “August Rush.”
This is the sort of movie that requires you not only to suspend disbelief, but to check your sanity at the ticket counter.
The title character – named after a slogan on the side of a Daily Snooze delivery truck, no less – is an orphaned musical prodigy.
In the space of six months, he is offered a scholarship to the Juilliard School and composes a symphony which he conducts in performance by the New York Philharmonic.
Remarkably, August’s only previous musical training is a brief stint with Wizard, played by Robin Williams in a red toupee as a cross between Fagin and Don Imus.
Wizard instructs August and other under-age street musicians by yelling at them in the ruins of the Fillmore East – which appears to have mysteriously moved from the Lower East Side to Queens – and delivering epigrams like “Do you know what music is? It’s a reminder there’s something else besides us in the universe.”
No plot twist is too shameless for the unintentionally hilarious script attributed to James V. Hart and Nick Castle, who turned Williams into a middle-aged Peter Pan in his earlier, uh, triumph “Hook.”
August has inherited his musical talent from his parents, a classical cellist (Keri Russell) and an Irish rock musician (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) who conceived him during a one-night stand on a rooftop overlooking Washington Square Park.
Though August has never known, much less met, his father, the youngster – played for maximum pathos by Britain’s Freddie Highmore (“Finding Neverland,” “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”) – has also mysteriously inherited his accent.
The parents separate the next day and neither is even aware of their son’s existence. Mom thinks he died at birth – at least until she learns otherwise from her dying father 11 years later.
She heads for New York to find him at the same time he abandons an upstate orphanage for the streets of the Big Apple, where, as the cliché goes, the youngster hears music everywhere.
Meanwhile, at the same time August’s dad decides to resume his long-abandoned music career – and look up August’s mom whom he’s never forgotten since their one night together (despite the actors’ utter lack of chemistry together).
Directed with a straight face by Irish director Kristen Sheridan (“Disco Pigs”), “August Rush” climaxes with a great big, schmaltzy family reunion at August’s concert in Central Park, where mom just happens to be a soloist.
Also in the crowd are all of August’s benefactors: a spunky street kid (Leon Thomas III); a kindly social worker (Terrence Howard, cashing in on his Oscar); a kindlier priest (Mykelti Williamson); and the kindliest woman (Marian Seldes) who apparently runs both Juilliard and the New York Philharmonic.
Only in New York, kiddies, only in New York.
AUGUST RUSH
Oliver Twisted.
Running time: 113 minutes. Rated PG (child abuse, mild profanity). At the E-Walk, the Lincoln Square, the Cinema 1, others.