I Still Believe (2020) - Movie Review

Yes, this is a film about music. No, it doesn’t have anything to do with The Lost Boys and/or Tim Capello. Yes, this is a Christian film. No, it isn’t of the same variety that I have spent quite a bit of time on here railing against. Yes, this stars the same couple from A Dog’s Purpose, making me think that the Erwin Brothers just wanted to salvage what they could from that feature, given Dennis Quaid’s casting in their last film. And no, with all of that in mind, this isn’t that bad. If anything, it’s alarmingly good.

For a start, for a story predominantly about Christian music, this might be the single most honest one I’ve ever encountered. This is the closest I’ve seen to this crowd outright admitting that that South Park bit about rewriting love songs to be about God might be accurate. A character actually says “I write love songs, to God”, and the concert scenes constantly play with how much of main character Jeremy Camp’s songs were written either about God or his wife.

I’m not saying any of this as a bad thing, though. That kind of honesty actually makes the whole affair regarding the intersection of worship and worship music sit a little easier than it did even with I Can Only Imagine. Again, referring to the concert scenes, the feelings of community and communion found within are actually pretty affecting, making it look like the Erwins learnt from their mistakes with their last effort.

This also shows in how the backstage business is handled. It admittedly includes a painfully-strained love triangle between KJ Apa’s Jeremy, Britt Robertson’s Melissa and Nathan Parsons’ Jean-Luc, but when it gets into the meat of the story, Melissa’s cancer diagnosis… fucking hell, I don’t think either of these leads have looked better than they do here. The heartache, the existential dread, even admiring the make-up of the universe as an example of God’s handiwork; they handle all of it remarkably well, and considering Britt’s unfortunate lack of quality control over the last handful of years, seeing her act the hell out of her dialogue here makes me hopeful that she’s turning a new leaf. Maybe now, I can stop thinking of her as that one actress who was the weakest part of a pretty great movie.

There’s also how there is not really that much ‘preaching to the choir’ to be found here, at least metatextually. Yeah, it’s all very insular within the Christian music scene, but there aren’t any exclusionary tactics at play in terms of the engagement with that music. It’s shown as an extension of the spiritual wellness that His light is supposed to provide, and given my own musings on the spiritually and metaphysically transformative qualities of art, I totally vibe with that idea even as an outlier of the faithful.

It might not be the greatest film out there, or even all that substantive, but as a based-on-actual-events Christian film, it’s a lot better than it has any reason to be, and it has genuinely made me change tact with some of the actors involved. It’s soul food, and considering the current state of the world, I’m not so jaded as to ignore that there’s a need for stuff like this.