Second Chance Romance

‘Juliet, Naked” is a provocative title, more so than the movie itself. Instead of lots of skin, we get lots of laughs and the seductive charms of adult romance the second time around. It is based on a book by Nick Hornby, one of Britain’s most prolific and successful authors, who has written often about music (“High Fidelity”) and family (“About a Boy”) and connections across cultural divides (“Brooklyn”).

Here director Jessie Peretz (“Our Idiot Brother”) concentrates on how some things — music and people — can take time, years really, to settle in. That describes the state of our protagonist, Annie (gorgeous and talented Rose Byrne), who finds herself comfortably stuck in an uncomfortable life in an English seaside town. She curates and oversees a quaint museum formerly run by her late father.

Annie lives with her longtime boyfriend, Duncan (Chris O’Dowd, the charming cop from “Bridesmaids,” here amusing and amusingly intense), who teaches film and TV at a local college with a sincere pomposity (he compares “The Wire” to Greek myth). They tell us they love each other and that they have ruled out having children, a choice more his than hers.

Duncan’s greatest passion is for a reclusive American alt rocker named Tucker Crowe (Ethan Hawke, who seems to be able to bring any character to life these days), whom he obsesses about online with other Crowe fanatics. Their main fixation is on “Juliet,” a collection of love-gone-wrong songs Crowe recorded 25 years earlier, when pop stardom was on his doorstep. But he killed his career by abandoning a concert tour in mid-performance, withdrawing from recording, growing a beard and a belly, and fathering a brood of children with different women. He only has time for his youngest son, Jackson (Azhy Robertson), apparently because the boy’s mom allows Crowe to live rent-free in her garage.

 After being contacted by Duncan and the other fanatics, he mails Duncan a homemade CD of a stripped down acoustic version of “Juliet,” which he labels “Juliet, Naked.” But Annie intercepts the CD, listens to it — she hates it — and before you can blink, she is having secret email chats with Crowe. You can guess where this is going, certainly when Crowe contrives to fly to England to meet Annie. The plot, you now realize, is secondary — so unlike Hornby’s book — to the characters, who deliver a contemporary, stylish version of the kind of romantic comedy that delighted audiences in the 1980s and 1990s.

Hawke can channel middle-aged regret and self-doubt, as he did in this year’s “First Reformed,”and he can also portray the ne’er-do-well dad you can’t stay mad at (“Boyhood”). Byrne is just right as the delightful, sincere person who seems waiting to meet someone like Crowe, who can pull her out of her dull life and point her toward the second chance few of us get.

By the way, Hawke can actually sing. In an especially meaningful scene, he covers the Kinks’ “Waterloo Sunset,” poignant but unsentimental. It is the right musical choice for a movie that is both delightful and deeper than it seems.

“Juliet, Naked” is playing in select theaters.