When “Once,” the small story of an earnest Irish busker singing earnest songs who falls for an earnest Czech immigrant, was released in 2006, it enchanted even the most hard-hearted movie critics. It wasn’t just diehard indie folk fans that wanted to eat “Once’s” two characters alive. Everyone of every temperament, style and taste loved “Once’s” stripped-down approach to the musical, the lack of grandiose dance numbers and groan-inducing punnery in its songs; even the notorious cranks at the Village Voice called it “one of the greatest musicals of the modern age.” It was a slice-of-life musical, a movie about two down-on-their-luck people writing songs on the spot, harmonizing them and then falling in love through developing them, but—in typical jaded indie cinema verite fashion—they remain too meek and earnest to act on their love.

As for me, on first inspection of Glen Hansard plucking away in some public square in Dublin, I wanted to strangle him; I live in New York, and you can’t walk twenty feet in Williamsburg without bumping into one of Hansard’s bearded, gentle, sensitive, self-important ilk. Once the positively adorable Marketa Inglova—a sort of pudgier, Slavic-accented Debra Winger—sets her sights on Hansard, and the two real-life musicians/lovers start to write duets, I softened a little. But I was still put-off by the film’s cutesy gimmicks—the characters are called “Guy” and “Girl,” the Guy explains his recent break-up by improvising a song on a public bus—not to mention the characters’ endless self-pitying. And the bummer of an ending seemed clichéd and forced in the same way that a traditional rom-com’s upbeat ending is—there was no reason except self-imposed malaise for Guy and Girl to stay apart.