Tuner has many of the hallmarks of a classic film noir: an alienated young man with an uncultivated talent, a gang of criminals who want to exploit that talent for financial gain, and a young woman who loves the man but doesn’t know he’s in over his head. It has a somewhat novel twist in that the hero is a musical savant who approaches heists like a conductor.
In that sense, it’s similar to the 1978 thriller Fingers, about a pianist torn between artistic aspirations and his Mafia family, and Edgar Wright’s Baby Driver, about a getaway man who times his escapes to music. It’s not as gritty as the former nor as flashy as the latter, but it’s occasionally bright and light on its feet, even as its plot grinds along with familiar and sometimes hackneyed trappings.
Leo Woodhall, best known for The White Lotus, plays Niki, the brooding piano tuner at the center of the story. He has an extreme sensitivity to loud sounds, which is a problem in clamorous New York City, so he walks around with noise-canceling headphones over his ears. Niki has an unusually keen ear, which is a classic superpower that has built-in limitations. He can automatically name the note when a key is plunked on the piano, but a smoke alarm causes him to crumple onto the floor.
His only family appears to be his boss, the cantankerous old timer Harry (Dustin Hoffman), and Harry’s wife Marla (Tovah Feldshuh), who often acts as Harry’s babysitter. At work, Niki is often left alone in giant houses where the pianos he’s tuning are mere decoration in grand halls. That’s how he runs into a group of Israeli guys who masquerade as handymen in order to steal from rich people.
Niki’s sensitive hearing, it turns out, means he has a knack for cracking safes; he can hear the grooves of the combination locks clicking into place. The ringleader of the group, Uri (Lior Raz), is operating under the (perhaps correct) assumption that wealthy people won’t notice when their stuff goes missing. And Niki’s girlfriend, a music student played by Havana Rose Liu, doesn’t think twice when he gives her a priceless pearl watch.
As in any classic noir, Niki gets in deeper and deeper, the toughs who employ him get more and more brazen, and the plot culminates in a narrative coincidence so outlandish that it nearly derails the story.
This is the first narrative feature from director Daniel Roher, who won an Oscar for his documentary Navalny. His nonfiction sensibilities could have brought more cultural detail to the story — the way Sean Baker’s portraits of underworlds and overlooked communities do — but we only get flashes of it. Still, Tuner is a mostly breezy, entertaining and stylish movie, though you get the feeling it could have been a great work instead of a merely good one.
Nathan Weinbender is a co-host of Spokane Public Radio’s “Movies 101” heard Friday evenings at 6:30 and Saturday afternoons at 2 on SPR News.