Sound of Metal.

This week’s Oscar nominations included a bunch of surprises, including Sound of Metal, available now on Amazon Prime, earning a Best Picture nod among its six overall nominations. It’s an extraordinarily well-acted piece, with well-earned nominations for Riz Ahmed and Paul Raci, with a story that has its heart in the right place but that has some plot holes I found it impossible to overlook.

Ahmed plays Ruben, the drummer for a two-piece hard rock band called Blackgammon along with his girlfriend, singer-guitarist Lou (Olivia Cooke). During one of their shows, he notices his hearing has almost vanished, and a subsequent trip to a doctor reveals that he’s lost about ¾ of his hearing, and while Ruben doesn’t want to accept it at first, it’s permanent and will require him giving up his career. He’s also a recovering addict, clean for four years, but when he tells Lou about his hearing loss, she freaks out and calls his sponsor, who quickly arranges a place for him a house for deaf people recovering from addiction run by Joe (Raci). Ruben spends at least several weeks at the house, gradually adjusting to his deafness, learning American Sign Language and working with some deaf kids at a local camp, but still wants to get the implants he thinks will save his hearing and his career – but that doesn’t work out at all like he planned.

Ahmed and Raci are this film, no offense to Cooke, who is fine in a modest role (other than her eyebrows, which appear to have been bleached in an unfortunate industrial accident). Ahmed wears this haunted look through so much of Sound of Metal that defines Ruben’s inability or unwillingness to accept his deafness, and that cuts through even scenes where he’s supposed to be happy. You can feel his frustration at the hand he’s been dealt – or that he’s dealt himself through his music, although that question is never acknowledged in the film – in almost every scene, but when he can no longer deny that he’s never getting back to where he once was, Ahmed delivers a moment that drives home the devastation. Raci’s nomination has to be the feel-good story of awards season, as he’s 72, with a limited resume in film and TV; Wikipedia has him appearing in just seven films before this, all in minor roles. Raci is the son of deaf parents, so he knew ASL already and I presume is very familiar with deaf culture, but without the credibility and compassion he provides in his role as the leader of the rehab house and a mentor who takes a particular interest in Ruben’s case, the film wouldn’t work. Once he exits the story, you can feel a little of the air escape, because the interactions between Ruben and Joe are the center of the film, and also its most credible elements.

The script works too hard to get Ruben to the rehab house, and struggles to give him a realistic path once he leaves. Ruben sees one doctor for a hearing test, and the doctor tells him about cochlear implants, but there’s no extensive consultation and somehow Ruben thinks the implants will restore his previous hearing – continuing to believe this right up until he gets the implants and has them activated. You don’t get cochlear implants without a long consultation first, and no doctor is going to wait until after the surgery (as Ruben’s does) to explain that implants don’t let you hear through your ears again. When Ruben reveals his deafness to Lou, she immediately reacts as if he’s relapsed, before he’s shown any indications of a problem. After Ruben gets his cochlear implants and asks Joe if he can stay a few more weeks while he waits for the activation, Joe tells him to leave immediately – which itself seems unrealistic, and antithetical to this sort of self-help program – and somehow Ruben, who said he was broke, ends up on a plane to Paris, where he shows up at the house of Lou’s father, who has never met Ruben and didn’t seem to know he was coming. There are just too many of these little plot conveniences for the film’s good, especially since some of them could have been addressed with modest changes.

The film landed six nominations, including the two for Ahmed and Raci; Ahmed has no chance to win against the late Chadwick Boseman (Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom) but would certainly be a worthy winner, while Raci seems like he’s going to lose to Daniel Kaluuya (Judas and the Black Messiah) yet would also be deserving of the award. I understand both of those nominations as well as the one for Best Sound, since so much here depends on the way the movie manipulates sound, often putting you into Ruben’s head to show how little he’s hearing. The nomination for Best Original Screenplay, however, seems to reward Sound of Metal for its greatest weakness – a script that takes shortcuts to get its main character where he needs to be – and why the movie ultimately fell short of Best Picture status for me.