This week in movies you missed: I could describe Beyond the Lights as the second film that made 2014 the Year of Slightly Increased Visibility of Black Female Directors (along with Ava DuVernay's Selma). Or I could just describe it as a surprisingly powerful little film that makes perfect summer viewing for anyone with even the slightest tolerance for romance scored to an r&b beat.

Either way, this show-biz drama from writer-director Gina Prince-Bythewood deserves to be less obscure than it is — at least in Vermont, where it didn't play theatrically.

What You Missed
Noni (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) is a girl from Brixton with a big voice who's living out a fantasy — she's a rising pop star through her professional and personal collaboration with a successful rapper (Machine Gun Kelly).

Yet on the night she wins a Billboard Award, right before her first album drops, Noni can't hold it together. Her momager (Minnie Driver) finds her perched on the balcony of her penthouse suite, ready to jump. Kaz (Nate Parker), the young cop who's running security that night, tries to talk Noni down. "You don't see me," she says. "I see you," he counters — and catches her when she falls.

The execs at the label threaten to kill Noni's album unless she demonstrates to the public that her near-death was just a drunken escapade — because "Suicide isn't sexy." Her "savior" appears beside her at press conferences where he's been paid to repeat the official line.

Meanwhile, Kaz's police captain dad (Danny Glover), who's been grooming his son to be the next Obama, sees this sudden celebrity as an opportunity to get Kaz into citywide political office.

No one's asking Kaz and Noni what they want. But they're gradually discovering they want each other.


Why You Missed It
Beyond the Lights reached about 1,800 theaters — none in Vermont, to my knowledge. Diane Warren's original song "Grateful" received an Oscar nomination. You can currently see the movie on Netflix Instant or rent it for a buck on Amazon.

Should You Keep Missing It?
As I watched Beyond the Lights, I periodically interrogated myself: "This movie could play on Lifetime and not seem out of place. It's like the indie version of The Bodyguard. You don't even like romances. So why are you enjoying it so much?"

Like Once, Beyond the Lights is a music-driven love story that somehow found its way through this anti-romantic's defenses. Let's examine why using my 20-point, highly scientific scale for the evaluation of indie films:

1-4 points: Does it look pretty?
4/4. Oh, yes. Here's one significant difference between Beyond the Lights and a typical Lifetime flick: its arty gloss and moody visual atmospherics. (Many of the nighttime LA scenes are splashed with purple, much like Noni's weave.) Granted, it sometimes looks like a high-quality music video or ad, especially when Noni and Kaz have an idyll in Mexico. But Prince-Bythewood (Love and Basketball) gives the movie an overall dreamy look that matches the soundtrack's rhythms and encourages us to suspend our disbelief in the unlikely romance.

1-4 points: Does anything happen?
4/4. Enough to give Noni's fans and haters plenty to tweet about. This is a show-biz melodrama that hits most of the beats you'd expect, from the opening breakdown to the cathartic final performance. 

1-4 points: Does what happens make sense?
2/4. As much as the clichés of show-biz melodramas do. Large parts of the film's screenplay are boilerplate. But it's never offensively dumb boilerplate, and a few scenes rise to the level of insight into the emptiness of modern celebrity. (I liked Noni's dry summary of her relationship with the rapper: "We texted. We hit it. We texted about hitting it.")

1-4 points: Do the characters seem like real people? Failing that, do they look pretty?