Rhythm Is a Dancer follows Ro (Lauren Caster), a young woman with a dwindling New York City dance career, who returns home to Long Beach to meet her biological father (Tate
Donovan) for the first time. Caster wrote, directed, and starred in this autobiographical film with an intended message about the inability to control the rhythm of your own life; the title serves as an apt metaphor about embracing new challenges. However, the movie’s purpose is quickly obscured by awkward dialogue and underdeveloped side characters, making it feel like one big cliché.
Joe M. Han’s cinematography becomes the main storytelling device more than any of the writing. The camera lingers on Ro’s expressions, homing in on her discomfort. Instead of quickly moving on to the next line, we get to witness her expressions when others don’t immediately respond to her. We get to live in Ro’s awkwardness and difficulty communicating with others.
Standout characters in the film are Ro’s biological father, Gregory (Tate Donovan), and Ethel (Marianne Muellerleile), a member of the nursing home that Ro begins to work at in Long Beach. Donavan brings warmth to every scene he enters as Gregory. He is a calming, supportive, and open presence that you instantly gravitate towards and ask for help from. Ro becomes comfortable asking Gregory heavier questions, as he quickly creates a space for her in his life; he is the dad everyone wants. Muellerleile steals the spotlight as Ethel, with comedic timing, directness, and confidence that is a much-needed foil to the tip-toeing Ro.
But once you get used to these two entertaining characters, you are left with writing that is good-intentioned but executed with zero subtlety. Scenes rarely unfold organically; they just pivot when the script needs them to. You get a heavy conversation about her biological father at a New York dinner table, followed by an awkward silence, and then – whiplash – “So what is everyone doing for the summer,” purely to tee up Ro’s move back to Long Beach. This conversation feels curated and unnatural, especially as they emphasize the rich people discussing their favorite vacation islands to show how out of place Ro feels; it’s an overused stereotype of discussion topics of the upper class. Ro repeats phrases like “my bio dad” or “my butch lesbian mom” so many times that it stops sounding modern and begins feeling like a shout to notice how progressive the script is. Even the joke about being “raised by a pack of lesbian wolves” gets trotted out like a catchphrase instead of a character detail. The only Black character exists solely as the hype‑friend who drags the protagonist out of her depression, and the emotional arcs lean on the most overused tropes imaginable: the drunk spiral because Gregory’s new family is perfect, the sad bar‑to‑strip‑club detour, and a party where she talks to the dog.
None of these core concepts of the film – learning to communicate with her mom, wanting happiness but not knowing how to reach it, slowly letting other people in – are inherently bad. But the script never earns them. Every scene starts sluggishly until one clunky line arrives to announce the point of the conversation, like the dinner in NYC or a chat at the nursing home that suddenly becomes a lecture on the term “bio dad.” It is writing that mistakes buzzwords for depth, shortcuts for structure, and clichés for character. The film’s heart is in the right place, but the writing keeps getting in its own way, leaving its strongest themes only partially realized.
Rhythm Is a Dancer will be released in select theaters in Los Angeles and New York City on July 8th and July 16th, respectively.
