Daniel Algrant’s career consists of three films produced with nearly a decade in between each project, as he followed 2002’s mediocre crime drama People I Know with this year’s biopic Greetings From Tim Buckley. But instead of waiting until 2022 to begin work on something else, he is lining up another interesting music-based film called Little Rootie Tootie, which has attracted the likes of Christopher Walken and Lenny Kravitz as its leads. I assume the film will eventually add the subtitle Are You Gonna Go My Way With More Cowbell.
According to Deadline, the film will follow Walken as Sonny, a lifelong jazz pianist mourning the recent death of his wife. As Sonny becomes increasingly destructive, his son (Kravitz) returns home from Europe, where he and his wife are successful musicians in their own right. The three of them attempt to function as a well-oriented family, but the eccentric lives of musicians eventually take over as the film veers towards a "tragic but impactful conclusion."
I’m not sure how I feel about a film’s ending being described in the basic plotline, but I’m sold on this regardless. I’m always interested in the lives of musicians – actual musicians, mind you, and not tabloid-ready pop singers – and this sounds like a pretty meaty story, with a script written by Algrant himself. It holds the same level of interest as the Pacino-starring Imagine. And I love Walken enough that I’d be interested in this even if he was playing a kazoo musician trying to build the world’s biggest house of cards. (Must write this idea down elsewhere.)
Walken is no stranger to roles with music involved, as he starred last year as a member of an emotionally imbalanced string quartet in Yaron Zilberman’s A Late Quartet, and will be starring in Clint Eastwood’s Jersey Boys, a biopic about Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons. On the non-music front, he’ll portray Zeus in Marc Turtletaub’s dramatic comedy Gods Behaving Badly, and will perform a little vaudeville work opposite Shirley MacLaine in Lian Lunson’s drama The Boom Boom Room.
Kravitz’s acting resume is short, but populated only by high-profile films, playing James Holloway in Lee Daniels’ The Butler earlier this year, and soon to reprise his role of Cinna in The Hunger Games: Catching Fire.
Little Rootie Tootie will begin production in New York City starting in January. But until then, how about a little Blue Oyster Cult? Just, you know, with a little more of one instrument.
