Mix Tape: A Love Story with Music

‘Anything I hear now, it’s like it’s not properly played until you’ve listened to it.’

This line from one of the young protagonists of the new four-part Binge series Mix Tape cuts right to the heart of the matter. When two people fall in love, everything around them can become part of their love story – that cafe with the bad coffee, that silly joke that broke the ice – but music more than anything else, it seems, is the thread that binds it together, adds colour and context to all those shared moments.

I mean, how many couples do you know who’ll say a certain track is ‘our song’?

Mix Tape is a touching love story about missed connections, long-held secrets and second chances, and it’s presented and performed with sensitivity and insight.

It would work perfectly well without the music hook that helps teenage lovers Alison and Dan (played by Florence Hunt and Rory Walton-Smith) find a shared language all their own, and then helps them to reunite decades later as adults (with Alison played by Teresa Palmer, Dan by Jim Sturgess) but, as a wise teacher of mine likes to say, ‘music starts when words end’. Sometimes a Spotify link will express or evoke what a love letter can’t.

Lifting a few of its vibes from Richard Linklater’s Before trilogy, some of High Fidelity’s author Nick Hornby’s pop-infused work, and even a little Wes Anderson in its heady rush of young love and adult disillusion, it’s understandable that Mix Tape won the Audience Award at the SXSW Festival in Austin, Texas earlier this year.

It’s an engaging and relatable story for its four-hour runtime, one that dovetails its dual timelines smoothly, with the events of the past informing and influencing the actions of the present and music as the conduit between them.

(Oh, and maybe this is the Generation X in me, but I found myself wishing that soundtrack compilations were still the in thing because Mix Tape‘s would be snapped up like mad. Yes, I know we now have playlists. No, it’s not the same thing.)

If kicking off with the jangly opening riff of Fools Gold by The Stone Roses doesn’t set the scene enough, the kids merrily puffing away on cigarettes certainly will: it’s 1989 in the Northern England town of Sheffield, and when Dan first sees Alison across a crowded room at a house party, he’s immediately taken with her, and she with him.

It’s not until they bond over the music and lyrics of Northern Sky by Nick Drake, however, that they recognise in one another a kindred spirit, and youthful affection begins to bloom into true love.

So why, when we cut to the 2020s, are Alison and Dan no longer together? Both are married to other people – Dan and his wife Katja (Sara Soulie) have a son, Alison and her husband Michael (Ben Lawson) two daughters – and living on opposite sides of the world: Dan is a freelance music journo who’s remained in Sheffield, while Alison is a novelist who’s spent the last 25 years in Sydney.

Neither are unhappy as such, but there’s dissatisfaction in the air. Chalk it up to the complications and compromises that accompany middle age, marriage and parenthood, sure, but when Dan learns about the publication of Alison’s first novel and tentatively reaches out via social media after years of no contact at all (we’ll learn why, don’t worry), the prospect of ‘what if’ is enough to prompt a reconnection, with the music of their youth building the bridge.

Mix Tape does stack the deck in favour of its central couple – neither Katja nor Michael appear all that supportive of their partners’ dreams and desires, often coming off as dismissive or patronising – but it doesn’t let Alison and Dan off the hook either, throwing plenty of small, everyday moral and emotional swerves into the mix alongside the more pivotal events that shape the story and its characters.

Still, our sympathies lie with them, because director Lucy Gaffy and screenwriter Lucy Spain, adapting Jane Sanderson’s 2020 novel, do a wonderful job of not just telling the two parallel stories but mixing them in ways that enhance each, creating a mosaic that’s at times sad, at others bittersweet but mostly hopeful.

Even with the burdens of the past and the problems of the present, there’s still a chance for Alison and Dan to live the lives they envisioned and become the people they dreamed they could be.

The performances enrich this even further. There’s a tiny bit of wish-fulfilment in the depiction of the younger incarnations of Alison and Dan – they’re smart, strong and sensitive in the way we all wish we were as teenagers – but Bridgerton’s Hunt and newcomer Walton-Smith also vividly convey the confusing, overwhelming surge of thoughts and feelings that accompany becoming who you are and finding your place in the world,

And it speaks volumes about their chemistry between Hunt and Walton-Smith – young Alison and Dan really do seem made for one another – that when the two characters reunite as adults, and Palmer and Sturgess are onscreen together for the first time, there’s a built-in feeling that they belong together. It’s not a sparks-flying kind of chemistry between these two actors, it’s more familiar … almost earned.

It doesn’t hurt that both actors do superb work separately, the talented and versatile Palmer in particular – in a brief, silent moment early on, the emotions dancing across her face as Alison receives and accepts Dan’s online friend request are exquisitely rendered.

Mix Tape is full of such moments – recognisable, resonant, real – and while the overarching story is one that justifies the viewer’s attention and affection, it’s those little hooks, those distinctive bits of phrasing, those moments of specificity that feel universal that take up residence and let it linger.

Not unlike a great song, one might suggest.