Toe-tappingly familiar

Despite the fact that they’ve never been paired together on screen before, there’s something familiar about Drew Barrymore and Hugh Grant together in Music and Lyrics. Maybe it’s the ‘80s nostalgia, which Barrymore first successfully tapped into in The Wedding Singer, or Grant’s stock romantic persona that feels like that oldie you forgot you liked until you heard it again.

In Music and Lyrics, Grant’s stuttering charmer is Alex Fletcher, a has-been from the fictional ‘80s’ pop band called, conveniently enough, Pop!. He gets the opportunity to break free from playing high school reunions and on small amusement park stages, when the new teenaged bubble gum popstress, Cora Corman (Haley Bennett), taps him to write a new song for her, if he can do it in a week. Enter Barrymore’s endearingly eccentric Sophie Fisher to serve as muse and love interest.

The team of Fletcher and Fisher – a name not quite as smooth as Lenon and McCartney – meet their deadline with her lyrics and his melody. A melody that has shades of “Killing me Softly,” which was featured in Grant’s earlier film, About a Boy. Lyrics works best when looking backward. Most of the songs evoke the feeling of the decade of excess rather than mock it outright. On the other hand, Fletcher’s final solo sounds like a bad take-off of “Trapped in the Closet.” He’s not in a musical though, and singing your feelings directly doesn’t work in real life.

Barrymore and Grant slip into old roles with ease. Both know their way around the genre, and make the most out of writer-director Marc Lawrence’s script, which focuses so much on the comedy element of romantic comedy that it ignores the other side. Fletcher and Fisher will get together as they, or people like them, always do. When free from the binds of the plot, Lyrics makes tight pants, bad rhymes, and the Jeopardy theme sing.

Music and Lyrics feels a lot like 80s music. It’s not too serious, it’s not quite good, but so wonderful that you start humming along despite yourself.

Music and Lyrics opens Valentine's Day in theaters across the country.