Memories of 'The Music Never Stopped'

Soulful, moving and utterly graceless, "The Music Never Stopped" is based on "The Last Hippie" by neurologist Oliver Sacks, and on a case study with a heartbreaking premise. When their long-missing son, Gabriel (Lou Taylor Pucci), is returned to Henry and Helen Sawyer (J.K. Simmons, Cara Seymour), he arrives with a brain tumor and, after surgery, no short-term memory.

Like children with a parent lost to Alzheimer's, Helen and Henry have their physical son, but not his mind, until it's discovered that music -- music made years earlier by the Grateful Dead, Bob Dylan and Cream -- can bring him out of his stupor. Gabriel might think Richard Nixon is still president, but he's made lucid and charming by the sounds of his youth. It's a small window, but Henry more or less jumps through it.

The generational rift is classic. Not only were they on opposite sides of the Vietnam argument, but Henry and Gabriel were musically opposed as well, which wounded Henry. He had taken great joy (via flashbacks) that the young Gabriel knew the pop hits of Henry's own youth. Gabriel's seduction by the counterculture and its soundtrack was a rebuff to Henry, so the father's subsequent embrace of music he instinctively hates -- but which provides an avenue to his son -- is hard, emotionally, to resist.

Less affecting are director Jim Kohlberg's rather studied evocations of the periods involved -- the '50s, '60s and '80s. Still, Pucci and Simmons make Gabriel and Henry such a good team you wonder why, like The Beatles, they ever broke up.