High Fidelity

The Mixtape of Our Failures

I’ve rewatched High Fidelity three times now, and each time I’m struck by how little it feels like a movie about love. It’s a movie about the stories we tell ourselves to avoid it—about the way we curate our past like a record collection, keeping only the tracks that flatter us. Rob Gordon, John Cusack’s record-store-owning protagonist, is a man who has turned his romantic history into a greatest-hits album of grievances, skipping the B-sides where he might’ve been the villain.

The film’s genius is in how it lets us laugh at him while recognizing, uncomfortably, that we’ve all done the same thing.

Stephen Frears, a director whose career has spanned everything from the scathing class satire of My Beautiful Laundrette to the brittle elegance of Dangerous Liaisons, approaches High Fidelity with a lightness that belies its sharpness. This isn’t a film that shouts its themes; it murmurs them over a jukebox hum, letting the music do half the work. The opening scene sets the tone: Rob, mid-breakup, turns to the camera and deadpans, “What came first—the music or the misery?” It’s a line that could’ve been insufferably pretentious in the wrong hands, but Cusack delivers it with the weary charm of a man who’s asked himself the same question a hundred times.

(The answer, of course, is that it doesn’t matter. The misery is the point.)

The film’s structure is deceptively simple. After his latest girlfriend, Laura (Iben Hjejle), leaves him, Rob embarks on a journey to track down his “top five most memorable breakups,” a conceit that allows the film to hopscotch through his past like a needle skipping across a warped record. It’s a gimmick that could’ve felt contrived, but Frears and screenwriters D.V.

DeVincentis, Steve Pink, John Cusack, and Scott Rosenberg (adapting Nick Hornby’s novel) use it to peel back the layers of Rob’s self-mythology. Each ex—from the manipulative Charlie (Catherine Zeta-Jones) to the earnest Penny (Joelle Carter)—reveals a different version of him, none of them particularly flattering. The film’s most brutal moment comes when Laura, in a quiet aside, tells him, “You’re a grown man who still blames his parents for his problems.” It’s a line that lands like a record scratch, jolting us out of the film’s easy humor and into something messier.

That’s the tightrope High Fidelity walks: it wants us to like Rob, or at least find him amusing, while never letting us forget that he’s kind of a jerk. Cusack, who co-wrote the script, understands this better than anyone. His Rob is a man who’s spent so long hiding behind sarcasm and vinyl that he’s forgotten how to be vulnerable.

Watch the way he fidgets when Laura confronts him about his immaturity—his fingers drumming against his thigh, his eyes darting away like he’s scanning the room for an exit. It’s a performance that’s equal parts charming and exasperating, and it’s what keeps the film from collapsing under the weight of its own cleverness.

The supporting cast, meanwhile, is a masterclass in comedic timing. Jack Black, in one of his earliest roles, steals every scene he’s in as Barry, Rob’s excitable, music-obsessed employee. His rants about “the fucking Eagles” and his insistence that “you can’t trust people whose CDs have never been scratched” are the kind of lines that lodge in your brain like an earworm.

(I’ve quoted them at parties. I regret nothing.) But the film’s real secret weapon is Joan Cusack, who plays Rob’s sister Liz with a dry, no-nonsense wit that cuts through the film’s occasional self-indulgence. When she tells Rob, “You’re not a victim.

You’re just an asshole,” it’s the kind of line that makes you wish the film had given her more screen time.