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The Idea of You Is a Mostly Not-Guilty Pleasure


Anne Hathaway is just terrific as a 40-year-old woman swept up by a romance with a boy-bander.

The former One Direction member is an inspiration author Robinne Lee has cited for the novel on which the movie is based, and while The Idea of You isn’t Harry Styles fan fiction (a budding subgenre), Hayes does retain the fuzzy outline of a projection. He isn’t a complete character, not like Solène Marchand (Anne Hathaway), the 40-year-old Silver Lake gallery owner whose chance run-in with him at Coachella, while accompanying her teenage daughter to a meet-and-greet, leads to a hectic affair. Even as the movie assures us that Hayes is more than just a teenybopper by showing him noodling around on a guitar in service of his own compositions, it revels in the experience of standing on the side of the stage in front of an arena full of screaming teenagers, being serenaded by someone making it clear the pop song he’s singing is for you.

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