DANNY COLLINS. Predictable, but memorable

Danny Collins (played by Al Pacino) has likely performed on just about every stage in the world over the decades. He sang his way to an enormous fortune. City streets are plastered with banners advertising his latest tour. He can afford a private jet, lives in a sleek modern mansion with a partner far younger than himself, and drives a gleaming Lamborghini to the store. Collins is a dandy, wearing extravagant clothes that loudly proclaim the undeniable fact that he is a “Rock Star.” His hands are adorned with expensive jewelry. He happily hands out hundred-dollar tips left and right. All it takes is opening a door, a subtle smile.

Danny enjoys flaunting his wealth. He wears a necklace with a golden cross that doubles as a vial for a personal dose of cocaine. His face is lined with wrinkles; before concerts he dyes his hair black to feel young at heart. Danny’s idol is John Lennon, who began performing a few years before him. The protagonist may have shared Lennon’s financial success, but certainly not his artistic one. Collins’s songs—especially the repeatedly referenced “Oh, Baby Doll”—are rather lightweight party hits. Yet all his life their author wanted to be someone else: a countercultural bard, the voice of his generation.

In old age, Danny is dissatisfied with the course of his career, and it is far too late to change his image as a stage celebrity. He wants to matter more. To write a ballad on the scale of “Imagine.” He wants, finally, to feel like an artist. For decades, however, he has been stuck in a creative impasse. He hasn’t written a single line or even one note in years, though he keeps saying that playing the piano is his first language. We meet him at the moment he decides to radically change his life—not only in artistic terms.

Among other things, Collins announces to his manager and, incidentally, his only friend (Christopher Plummer) that he is canceling the tour. He retreats to New Jersey, holed up in a Hilton hotel apartment run by Mary Sinclair (Annette Bening). Danny has probably never met anyone like her before: untainted by the pathologies of show business, firmly grounded, disarmingly natural. Someone who doesn’t hide her true self or pretend to be anyone else. Naturally, the two begin to flirt and slowly grow closer. This romance, however, is only a side plot.

For Collins does not choose New Jersey by accident—his estranged son lives there, a man with whom he has long been at odds and has had no contact. The protagonist wants to rebuild the relationship with him and his family. He also wants to meet his granddaughter (a terrific Giselle Eisenberg), who has ADHD. Danny’s wealth and connections might help with her treatment. It will also be a chance to salvage his relationship with his son, who despises him. Only then does Collins truly come back to life.

The film’s two main threads—the attempt to change artistic identity and the family drama—are competently intertwined, though the director could have drawn more from the story. At times, an emotional chill seems to emanate from the screen a bit too often. Collins’s transformation itself, however, feels convincing. New goals appear in his life for the first time. Danny begins to see how much he has lost; at last, he starts to grow up. It is never too late for that. Danny is another charismatic, flamboyant, and loud character in Pacino’s career. His Collins wears elaborate outfits, uses emphatic gestures, and is almost indecently direct. It is a carefully thought-out performance, consistently developed by the American actor—even if the character is deeply stereotypical.

Idol is undoubtedly a predictable film, at times overly conservative. Still, it offers several memorable scenes and a number of well-written dialogues.