Hamnet isn’t the only movie Mescal has out this month

Don’t let that grandiose title, The History of Soundfool you. Despite the presence of Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor, director Oliver Hermanus’ star-crossed romance set in early 20th-century America is just too affected, too mannered and too muted to amount to much more than a very handsome-looking period piece.

Adapted from Ben Shattuck’s short story of the same name, it’s a poetic meditation on how music can call down the decades to trigger memories and create unshakable bonds, but the meandering storyline shows scant regard for the very thing it aims to celebrate.

Paul Mescal plays Lionel Worthing, a Kentucky farm boy whose preternatural gift for music has landed him a scholarship in the New England Conservatory in 1917. One night in a local bar, he meets the more worldly David White and they bond over their love of the kind of lost Appalachian and English folk songs that are about to be swept away by the advent of the wireless and the arrival of jazz.

A romance blossoms, but their liaison is cut short by the US’s entry into the Great War. David is sent packing to Europe; Lionel’s poor eyesight excuses him and he returns to the family farm to look after his elderly mother.

On David’s return, the young lovers reunite and set off on a field trip to gather, document and record the folk songs of rural Maine on wax cylinders, rather like ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax’s real-life research some ten years later. This is where the movie is at its best, with the young musicologists drifting through gorgeous landscapes and stopping off in inlets and backroads to collect the music and songs of the impoverished locals.

However, it’s clear that something of the already illusory David’s soul has been left on the fields of Flanders – the romance withers and David will become a ghostly figure who will haunt Lionel for the rest of his life.

Mescal and O’Connor are both very impressive in this melancholic tale of repressed masculine emotion and Maine in Winter is a visual treat. Oh, and Mescal can indeed sing.

However, it is curious that so little screentime and love are shown to the actual music that would go on to influence and inspire generations of singers and musicians in the years to come. The History of Sound ends up like a love song without a decent melody.