Tuner, an offbeat character study about a troubled young New York piano tuner, is like a keyboard whose ivories are touched too lightly but beg for a more resonant plunk. From director Daniel Rohner, whose 2022 doc Navalny won an Oscar, it’s capably made and well-acted, but told in a low-key register that can sometimes feel uncommitted. It has drama, but rarely feels truly dramatic; there’s a love story that never quite catches fire and a crime subplot that doesn’t fully thrill.
Rising star Leo Woodall (The White Lotus, Nuremberg) plays the piano tuner, Niki White, a soft-spoken protégé to longtime tuner Harry Horowitz (an underused Dustin Hoffman), the laboring duo haunting New York City’s five boroughs, often summoned to upper-class homes to get their pianos in tune (and, at times, asked to do other jobs, like, well, fix toilets). The pair spend their days in Harry’s branded van (many shots of a dashboard Hoffman bobblehead), a kind of father-son journeyman duo, and the opening of the picture teases a warm camaraderie; soon, however, Hoffman’s Harry suffers a medical crisis, leaving the business—and largely the film—to Woodall’s Niki.
For his part, Niki may be the best piano tuner in the business, but he has a serious hearing affliction called hyperacusis, which makes him ultra-sensitive to any louder-than-average sound; even things that seem normal to most people—like home construction work—register at such high decibels that he frequently clutches his headphone-covered ears. Perhaps he’d be more suited to a cabin in Big Sur than on the mean streets of Manhattan? One of Rosner’s best touches here is the subjective, richly detailed sound design and its amplification from scene to scene; he and Woodall excruciatingly pull you inside Niki’s head.
After Niki cleverly uses his hearing ailment to assist Harry and wife Marla (a warm Tovah Feldshuh) in cracking their home safe, he falls into a low-level gangster ring of sorts, helping crack safes in the boroughs and beyond, led by hair-trigger Uri (Lior Raz). And while Niki pockets fast cash to pay for Harry’s medical expenses, he also very slowly courts a pretty young pianist named Ruthie—first in need of a piano fix (her apartment has flooded and perhaps destroyed the keys) and then maybe a boyfriend—well-played by Havana Rose Liu. Eventually, his double life catches up, as they tend to do.
Woodall, whose American soldier confessional scene in James Vanderbilt’s recent Nuremberg stole the film from co-stars Rami Malek and Russell Crowe, does his very best to keep all of this reasonably watchable. With huge, sad eyes and an impressive emotional minimalism (unlike many of his contemporaries, he never displays overconfidence), he makes Niki a guarded enigma, someone whose loaded quietness holds a past pressing just against his surface. Predictably, Niki’s former life as a piano prodigy will be revealed, and when we hear him play again, credit Woodall’s careful character calibration throughout Tuner for giving the scene its punch.
But the film—which almost works as an idiosyncratic portrait of a wounded young man too closed off from the world, too early, who may be morally compromised but finds a glimmer of hope—feels less invested in its story than its lead character, and its plot mechanics are simply not that involving. And while Rohner works to free the story from the inherent commercial tropes of most crime pictures, the rest of his 109-minute film lacks forward thrust, even when Niki’s deception is uncovered. While Woodall and the striking sound design are standouts, Tuner hums a bit off-key.
2 1/2 stars
