Joel on Film

K-Pops! is certainly at its best when focused upon the music, and considering this is the directorial debut of Anderson .Paak, a rap musician who also stars as a hip-hop artist, that shouldn’t be such a surprise. There’s a scene here where BJ, the character played by .Paak, explains the trajectory of music history, which almost entirely stemmed from Black artists in some way, to the boy he will soon learn is his own son. It speaks deeply to the interests of the film’s progenitor and creator, and the effect is almost jarring in both its simplicity and its deceptive depth.

Then there are the actual performances—from ones in the opening act that are meant to communicate BJ’s talent within his stated genre, to the big dance numbers in tribute to the genre of the title, courtesy of some actual Korean pop outfits appearing either as themselves or as fictional counterparts. Since the filmmaker knows what he’s doing with this side of the story, such sequences are obviously quite effective and sometimes rousing. That occasionally carries over into another avenue of the storytelling, too.

It’s most apparent in the film’s early stretches, which take place in 2009 with BJ relentlessly pursuing his dream at the expense of everything else. He’s tested in that devotion, though, when he meets Yeji (Jee Young Han), a nice and thoughtful young woman with whom BJ quickly and confidently falls in love. The romance is whirlwind, which makes her conspicuous absence 15 years later immediately suspect: Something must have happened between the two, and yes, the question has both a direct answer and sort of an indirect one, too.

More important to this story is the direct answer, which is that Yeji had BJ’s son, intentionally kept that information from him, and went off to Korea, where she works as an assistant manager for her mother (Crystal Lee) but lives this life with a lot of built-up resentment. She has raised a good kid in Tae Young (Soul Rasheed), who has the natural musical abilities of his dad but (according to mom) none of the immaturity just yet. At first, this is enough to sustain the film’s sense of drama, to whatever degree it has one.

It eventually isn’t enough, though, to the film’s detriment, because .Paak feels the need to layer everything in thick broad comedy and an arthritic sense of faux wit. Han’s performance is the best at cutting through all this with her subtly pained expressions and the impulse to remain quiet, even when the character is at the forefront of the action. The director, though, is a little less able when it comes to massaging the nuances out of this character—with the exception, of course, of moments like the one mentioned at the outset.

That does matter quite a bit as the story moves ahead to focus on the musical side of things, as Tae Young prepares for a big TV competition against a bona fide K-pop idol (played by Kevin Woo, a bona fide K-pop idol). If the numbers are expertly staged and executed, all of the tension in these scenes is obviously manufactured, with BJ sometimes sparring with a conniving show host (played by Cathy Shim) and several generic montages devoted to coaching Tae Young and his fellow teenaged dancers. It’s cute enough but pretty thin and mostly here for the laughs.

That leaves the familial side of the plot to carry the day, and it nearly works, though the tonal mishmash of certain elements—like how BJ’s mom (played by Yvette Nicole Brown) has taken up with his much-younger friend Cash (Jonnie Park)—is fatally uneven in the face of a would-be-touching reconciliation between old lovers. The strong start and musical focus of K-Pops! nearly make up for the unevenness of what comes later, but it simply becomes too devoted to broad comedy and mushy sentimentality to come together successfully.

Rating: **½ (out of ****)