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Go behind the scenes of O'Dessa with writer/director Geremy Jasper and stars Sadie Sink and Kelvin Harrison Jr.
Featurette: Searchlight Pictures

O'Dessa
Directed by Geremy Jasper
Rated PG-13
Comforted 20 March 2025
#ODessa

It's hard to argue with a movie when its storyline revolves around saving the world with three chords and the truth.

It Might Get Loud

O’Dessa is like Spinal Tap meets Brazil meets Star Wars meets A Coal Miner’s Daughter meets Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome meets the Holy Bible. Such a description makes it sound more derivative than it really is. O’Dessa is an ambitious movie featuring some great original music. And that – in the modern world of streaming "content" rather than movies – is pretty exciting.

So, yes. O’Dessa is a rock ‘n’ roll musical and it’s the second feature from writer/director Geremy Jasper, a follow-up to his 2017 release, the rapper story Patti Cake$. It’s a small-budget spectacle with big-budget dreams.

In O’Dessa, the location moves from modern-day New Jersey to a future, dystopian world and one of the last strongholds of humanity, a scuzzy place called Satylite City, a wretched hive of scum and villainy, so to speak. O’Dessa Galloway (Sadie Sink, Stranger Things) is a country girl, living in the absolute dead center middle of nowhere in a lonesome shack shared with her ailing mother after her father (a Johnny Cash-like figure) heads out as a ramblin’ man and never returns home. One of the movie’s best lyrics is so elegant as the mother sings of her heartbreak and the guitar-centered life of her ramblin’ husband, "He picked them strings over me."

O’Dessa’s destiny has been foretold. She is the Seventh Son and her music will save souls. Bequeathed her father’s most excellent-looking guitar, she sets out on her quest after her mother’s passing. She is now the last of the ramblers and the role of the rambler is to "comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable."

It ain’t an easy life as a rambler. Much like Mad Max, she’s robbed out on the savage roads and makes her way to Satylite City destitute just as Max made his way to Bartertown. With her precious, one-of-a-kind legacy guitar pawned off and fetching top dollar in a seedy shop, O’Dessa crafts her own guitar so she can play her music and make enough money to buy back the guitar that is rightfully hers. In a junkyard, she goes full-tilt Jack White and creates a guitar out of random junk.

Sweet, sweet stuff.

One

As the movie settles in, the setting and the story start to make more sense. Even on the surface, it’s easy to relate to the desensitization of society. People have had the life drained out of them as they stare, hypnotized, at plasma TVs, enthralled by a televangelist/game show host/reality TV MC named Plutonovich (Murray Bartlett, The White Lotus). But peel away the gaudiness of some of the costumes and settings, put things in their proper, allegorical context. O’Dessa rails against social media, reality TV, the crass aspects of talent competitions and the lack of human connectedness. There’s also the obsession with building up celebrities then tearing them down, of watching the unpleasant demise of others real-time, as it happens on reality TV.

Ultimately, O’Dessa carries a simple message: people want something that moves them, but they don’t know it yet. They’ll know it when they hear it.

The fun is in seeing how Jasper brings in the iconography of rock music and different musical styles, particularly Cash-like country-rock, folk and pop. A bonus is – as with Patti Cake$ - the songs are actually performed by the stars, including Sink and, as her love interest, Euri Dervish, Kelvin Harrison Jr. (B.B. King in Baz Lurhmann's Elvis). During those fanciful musical numbers, O’Dessa is at its best. At times it throws a vibe reminiscent of Julie Tamor’s Beatles movie, Across the Universe. But the beauty of it is the songs aren’t merely covers of classic rock; they are originals written for the movie by Jasper and his Patti Cake$ collaborator, Jason Binnick.

If only those performances by Sink and the gang were captured on-set, as was done in James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown, also from Searchlight. Instead, the pristine, canned performances of the songs at times sit uncomfortably and imperfectly against the on-screen actions of the characters. It’s a tight balancing act. Mangold’s movie is a best-of-breed example, while Alan Parker’s movie version of Evita (starring Madonna as Eva Peron) stands as a movie that’s at times hard to watch because of the disconnect between the music and the actions. It turns into an exercise in lip-syncing.

Eye in the Sky

It’s a shame this very artsy movie didn’t get a theatrical release and instead went direct to Hulu. As it opens, the big-screen ambitions are obvious. The Searchlight Pictures logo and fanfare are updated with a tie-died color palette and stage-setting title cards are presented on a tube TV. At some point, this movie was headed to theatres.

The big-screen by-pass is likely a by-product of the current cultural climate. There’s an unnecessary (rather distracting, actually) gender reversal between bride and groom roles and the "Seventh Son" of the movie’s prophecy turns out to be a girl. Why do it that way? These are creative choices that will surely turn off some while also gaining little of meaningful distinction. Have the prophecy be about the daughter and sideline the gender play. It’s unnecessary when the movie’s message can carry the same sentiments.

After all, the underlying themes of O’Dessa are how music can be a powerful, life-changing force and how important it is to inspire others instead of hold them back.

That’s what the world needs now more than ever: inspirational forces for good.

Given those creative elements, it’s easy to see how this movie would likely struggle at the theatrical box office. Even so, it’s such a vibrant, colorful production, it’d be fun to view it on a screen much larger than any typical home could possibly support with a sound system turned up to 11 so the songs can shine. Jasper brings an artistic vision to the screen and, sadly, it’s a rarity in an age when movies are labeled as "content" to be streamed, cookie-cutter entertainment, a disposable commodity instead of a cultural touchstone.

That’s not to say Jasper hits all the right notes and keeps everything in tune. It’s nifty when O’Dessa’s six-string is given a seventh string (a string of personal significance to O’Dessa). But it doesn’t work well when – as part of a climactic talent display – O’Dessa’s guitar is pared back to a single string to be plucked while accompanied by a finger slide. Maybe that could be okay as part of an excruciating, personal performance demonstrating an uncanny ability to carry on against all odds.

But then there’s also an off-screen piano backup. It’s a disappointing betrayal of the musical element, a turning of the musical tables when something likely cooler could’ve been accomplished with those seven strings for the Seventh Son (or Daughter). Something righteous.

Something most excellent, dude.

• Originally published at MovieHabit.com.