Música (2024) | Dir. Rudy Mancuso
Courtesy of Amazon MGM Studios
Written by: Belle McIntyre
Rudy Mancuso is a barely-contained, bundle of creative energy – writer, director, star, and music composer in his first feature film. New to me, he has an avid following on the internet for his comedic short skits, puppetry, and music videos of himself performing his own work. In this largely autobiographical film, he plays Rudy, a Brazilian-American college senior living with his mother in working-class New Jersey, facing a post graduate dilemma of direction. Gawky-looking, with an unruly mop of upswept hair which could have been styled with an eggbeater, he lives for music but he has not figured how to make it into a career. Mostly he puts on puppet shows in the subway for spare change.
Courtesy of Amazon MGM Studios
His personal life is equally undirected, with an unlikely girlfriend from a well-to-do waspy family, Haley (Francesca Reale), wants a conventional secure future with Rudy. It is obvious from the first scene between the two of them that she has made a bad choice with Rudy. He is awkward, infuriatingly distant and noncommittal. His mother, Maria (Maria Mancuso), to whom Rudy is devoted, owns a hair salon, and wants him to find a nice Brazilian girl. She keeps inviting girls home for Rudy and plies them with caipirinhas with parasols. She has no success until Rudy finds his own Brazilian girl, the beautiful Isabella (Camilla Mendes), who actually understands him and encourages him.
Courtesy of Amazon MGM Studios
The real problem with Rudy is inside his vivid, oddly-wired head, which is far more interesting and irresistible than the outside world. Rudy suffers from synesthesia, a condition which involves the stimulation of one sensory area onto another unrelated one. Imagine that due to some faulty wiring in the brain, everyday sounds like horns honking, footsteps, sirens, or jackhammers, morphed into tangible rhythms impossible to ignore, and amplified into vibrant musical numbers seen and heard by the film audience but no one else outside of the fevered brain generating them. It seems to be episodic with Rudy going into a trance-like place mid-sentence where some version of “Stomp” is being played out.
Courtesy of Amazon MGM Studios
Mancuso has managed the seemingly impossible task of simulating what is going on inside his brain at the same time as he tells his own story from the outside as it affects everyone in his life. The story leaps between the career choices and the two women with ecstatic musical numbers illustrating his experience. It is immersive and a seriously promising first feature with a satisfyingly untypical ending. One man’s cacophony is another man’s inspiration.
