Alright Now features Cobie Smulders in all the images showing up about the film. I watched this movie because of her, but it was a great disappointment.

Alright Now was completely improvised and shot in five days. It’s as rough and erratic as you would imagine that kind of film to be. Jamie Adams wrote and directed the film. He has a reputation for putting together improvised films in five days.

Joanne (Cobie Smulders) is a lead singer in a band. She’s frequently drunk and/or high. The band had some hits in the 90s, but their time is long over. When the band manager Larry (Noel Clarke) who is also Joanne’s sometime lover, tells her the band is breaking up she goes a little nuts.

Joanne goes to see her old friend Sara (Jessica Hynes) who lives in a caravan in the middle of a field. They get drunk and somehow manage to enroll Joanne in the local college and get her a room in the dorm.

When they get to the college, the registrar is Pete (Richard Elis), the same man who had recognized Joanne in a bar the night before. She developed a crush on this unlikely schlub of a man — I have no idea why — and somehow this became a love story.

I don’t know what kind of outline for the character Cobie Smulders got from the director, but her improvisation was wildly inconsistent. She was annoying and overbearing, then suddenly in love, then suddenly sober and writing new songs, then suddenly ready to move home to Seattle and her dad (Griffin Dunne).

Even though the film was pretty bad, I watched it. I got hooked on seeing Cobie Smulders have free rein to create a character out of her own talent. My conclusion is she’s a great actor but she benefits from a good script.

This film came out in 2018, so it’s not exactly hot news. It’s known as Songbird in some locations. It is streaming on the Roku Channel and Tubi if you feel like taking a look.