Photo: John Carney's Once

Once is the David Gray or James Blunt of movie musicals, and amazingly enough, that's not a bad thing. Scoring his delicate love story to the tunes of its central singer-songwriter couple, John Carney doesn't reinvent the musical genre so much as ground it in grimy, believable indie-ness, with his film's songs realistically nestled into his Dublin-set tale of a thirtysomething street performer and vacuum cleaner repairman known only as Guy (Glen Hansard) and a Czech Republic immigrant, single mother and rose-seller known only as Girl (Markéta Irglová). Meeting after one of his late-night performances, the two strike up an intimate friendship rooted in their shared on-the-fringe situations and musicianship dreams, the latter eventually leading to tentative collaboration. Carney's narrative is so thin that it feels like it might blow away (or be blown in a contrived direction) at any moment. And yet his handheld verité direction results in subtly well-staged scenes and images that visually reflect his protagonists' ever-shifting relations to each other.  Nick Schager