The lure of rock & roll (and one cutie keyboardist-singer) proves to be too much for classically trained violinist and Russian émigré Sasha (Philippe Quint) in David Grubin’s lightly amusing portrait of the lower-Manhattan music scene. Caught between his father’s desire for him to play Tchaikovsky and his own desire to get his ya-yas out, Sasha’s plight is constructed into a fairly tidy Jazz Singer–ish dichotomy. The use of real musicians (both professionals, like Nellie McKay, and street performers) provides a certain authenticity to the performances, but the film’s wide-eyed view of New York as a wonderland of harmonic diversity soon grows as tiresome as the film’s trite romantic shuffling.
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