I don’t know how they did it, but directors Kelly O’Sullivan and Alex Thompson, working from O’Sullivan’s script, risked a hundred pitfalls in their new film “Ghostlight” and sidestepped nearly every one.
For starters, “Ghostlight” is a love letter to the healing power of theater. Sentimental pitfall! It’s also a concealed-secret narrative, in which the cause of one family’s grief gets leaked, strategically, in increments. Narrative plumbing pitfall!
It’s openly reliant on big coincidences. Its protagonist, construction worker Dan, his mind on other things, walks by a storefront temporarily occupied by a microbudget theater troupe rehearsing Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet.” Seconds later, Dan’s thrown into the cast because the company’s an actor short. He then keeps this endeavor a secret from his wife and daughter, for a while. Initially cast as Lord Capulet, this middle-aged newbie is shoved into the role of teenage Romeo. Dan may not know Shakespeare but he knows about young love and terrible fate tragically well. Art imitates life. And that’s another pitfall, or at least a mighty familiar notion.
By the end of “Ghostlight,” however, all these pitfalls just sort of pit-fell away for me. Its title referring to the lone bulb kept on at night when it’s closing time for a theater, this Chicago-made export goes about its business with plainspoken grace and some terrifically astute actors.
Keith Kupferer, for starters. He’s playing an ordinary guy, somewhat beaten down by circumstance, bottled up by temperament. (If “Inside Out” took place inside this character’s mind, the emotions would be Repression, Ambivalence, Stewing and I Don’t Want To Talk About It.) The actor doesn’t overdo anything, even when O’Sullivan’s lines underline a point or realization too neatly. Kupferer finds the right, watchful humor in the early rehearsal scenes, and honest pathos where it comes honestly.
Tara Mallen maximizes the supporting role of Sharon, Dan’s resourceful but frustrated educator wife; in a larger, showier role, the formidable Katherine Mallen Kupferer portrays their high-school senior daughter Daisy, who unlike her father is very much a theater geek, happy on stage, offstage somewhat lost and ready to pounce at the next perceived slight or insult. These three constitute a real-life Chicago theatrical family, and they’re skillful in wonderfully different ways.
Dolly De Leon, so good as the revenge-on-capitalism shipwreck survivor in “Triangle of Sadness,” finesses the role of Rita just so, her unlikely Juliet in “Romeo and Juliet” just waiting for Dan and his version of Romeo to come along. Much of “Ghostlight” plays as fish-out-of-water comedy. But it’s a comedy unfolding inside a drama riven by loss and regret. The previous feature from O’Sullivan and Thompson, “Saint Frances” (2019), found similarly fruitful and surprising mixtures of tone in its story. If O’Sullivan brings more of the nuance and layered ambiguity of her own work as a performer to her scripts, she’ll find that elusive next level of craft.
Visually “Ghostlight” keeps things clean and unadorned, shooting all around Chicago (Lincolnwood’s beloved Novelty Golf and adjoining Bunny Hutch get not one but two major pops) and Waukegan. The movie earns the audience’s tears. I’m a much easier crier in life than at the movies; I blame the movies for that, at least the crummy ones interested only in clobbering us into submission. “Ghostlight” works differently, even if aspects of its narrative suggest otherwise. It’s less about the healing power of theater and more about the persuasive power of the right actors working with two responsive filmmakers, sidestepping pitfalls and finding little nuggets of behavioral gold en route to a most unlikely Romeo’s opening night.
“Ghostlight” — 3 stars (out of 4)
MPA rating: R (for language)
Running time: 1:55
How to watch: Premieres in theaters June 14. Chicago premiere at the Music Box Theatre, 3733 N. Southport Ave.
Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.