Is ‘The Idea of You’ Harry Styles Fan Fiction? The Answer Is Complicated

Hayes Campbell, the dreamy protagonist of the brand new rom-com “The Idea of You,” has a bit in widespread with the mega pop star Harry Styles:

• In the film, Hayes, performed by Nicholas Galitzine, is a member of August Moon, a boy band with tons of very ardent teen and tween lady followers. Styles was a member of a boy band referred to as One Direction. You’ve in all probability heard of it.

• Hayes is British. So is Harry Styles.

• Hayes finally quits his band and begins making soulful pop rock. So did Harry.

• Hayes likes up to now older girls, and his relationship with a gallerist named Solène Marchand (Anne Hathaway) is the spine of the movie. Harry, too, has been concerned in tabloid-documented relationships with older girls, most famously, the actress and director Olivia Wilde.

So does “The Idea of You” come off as an act of fan fiction? Bizarrely, no, even when the shadow of Styles does loom giant over the entire undertaking.

Plenty of headlines have already described the film as “Harry Styles fan fiction,” although Robinne Lee, the writer of the 2017 novel on which it’s primarily based, is usually coy in interviews about whether or not the pop star impressed her ebook.

“Inspired is a robust phrase,” Lee has mentioned. The writer, who can also be an actress with levels from Yale and Columbia Law School and maybe finest recognized for her appearances in movies like “Hitch” and “Fifty Shades Darker,” has described encountering “the face of a boy I’d by no means seen in a band I’d by no means paid consideration to” and considering it was “artwork.” After the novel grew to become a viral sensation, Lee informed Vogue in 2020, “This was by no means imagined to be a ebook about Harry Styles.” In a bit for Time printed this month, Lee argued that “assuming a novel with a fictional movie star in a relationship have to be primarily based on an current movie star — on this case, the web has determined, Harry Styles — is unimaginative at finest and sexist at worst.”

She is definitely much less specific a few pop star connection than Anna Todd, whose “After” sequence of novels began explicitly as Styles fan fiction on the platform Wattpad and have since been become a movie franchise. (It’s a path that is likely to be acquainted to followers of “Fifty Shades,” which began as “Twilight” fan fiction.) However, not like “The Idea of You,” the “After” sequence has nothing to do with a boy band. The Harry of “After” is a school pupil named Hardin, however when the primary novel was printed in 2014, the portrayal outraged some One Direction lovers with the best way it turned Styles into a foul boy manipulating a younger lady. One 14-year-old Styles fan informed The New York Times then: “The method Harry on this ebook is portrayed is disgusting.”

On the opposite hand, Styles followers have embraced “The Idea of You” as textual content that may feed their obsession. Kayla Kleinman, a social media manager at Bookshop.org, was not a Styles devotee when she first learn the novel, however grew to become one after ending it through the pandemic. She felt “emotionally connected” to the ebook, and needed the expertise of studying it to proceed, she mentioned in an interview. So she sought out Styles’s music. “In my head it felt like a continuation of the story regardless that I very a lot knew that they weren’t,” she mentioned. “But to me that subsequent step was being like, ‘OK, I’m going to dive into this world as a factor to entertain myself.’” Now Kleinman has even gone to Harry Styles live shows with a good friend she produced from an “Idea of You” Facebook group.

The novel, it’s price noting, does extra to tell apart between Harry and Hayes than the film does. In Lee’s model, Hayes is a boy from a fancy upbringing who put collectively August Moon himself. In the movie, which was tailored by the director Michael Showalter and his co-writer Jennifer Westfeldt, Hayes is forged within the group after auditioning, not not like the best way Styles was on the British model of “The X Factor” earlier than being chosen for One Direction. (That mentioned, the ebook options appreciable dialogue of Hayes’s dimples, which appears like a direct reference to Styles’s seems.)

But whereas these modifications align the Hayes onscreen with the Harry of actuality, they surprisingly don’t make the film indebted to Styles. Rather, they simply make it extra grounded than Lee’s novel, which generally comes throughout as a listing of detailed descriptions of the furnishings of luxurious resorts together with copious intercourse scenes.

The movie understands that the fantasy of a Harry Styles sort is a potent one. Styles has earned the love of hundreds of thousands not simply because he’s engaging and has a pleasant singing voice and impressive glam-rock model. There is an thought perpetuated by his fandom that he’s accepting and, most of all, form. (He even recorded a music, launched after the “Idea of You” novel, referred to as “Treat People With Kindness.”) That kindness is filtered via the brand new movie.

As the film opens, Solène, divorced and on the verge of turning 40, steps in when her ex (Reid Scott) has last-minute plans that stop him from taking their teenage daughter, Izzy (Ella Rubin), to Coachella. Izzy (a center schooler within the novel, however aged up right here) is now not enamored with August Moon and is now into feminine singer-songwriter sorts, however her wealthy, inattentive dad has paid for a meet-and-greet with the band.

Solène then meets cute with Hayes when she by accident wanders into his trailer, considering it’s a public restroom. He’s charmed and begins to pursue her by visiting her gallery within the reliably hip Silver Lake neighborhood in Los Angeles, the place he seems upon her with surprise as she explains the artwork to him.

Hayes, as performed by Galitzine, is one thing of an ideal man. He’s good-looking. (Duh.) He’s gifted. The August Moon of the movie has its personal songs, which implies that these crushing on Hayes don’t should think about him singing One Direction tunes, and in any case Hayes needs to pursue a deeper type of musicianship. He’s persistent with out being aggressive, charming with out being saccharine. Yes, he’s youthful than Solène — aged up from 20 to 24 within the movie — however he doesn’t fetishize her age. He’s simply entranced by her smarts and sweetness.

Galitzine appears to grasp {that a} film like this works provided that the viewers can see how in love he’s with Solène, and to perform that he cedes the ground to Hathaway. While the Solène of the ebook namedrops designer garments, Hathaway makes her earthy, somebody in a interval of re-evaluation after having a toddler too younger with an in the end disappointing husband. Her warning in embarking on a tryst with Hayes is met with a dose of self-deprecation that doesn’t really feel compelled. You see her bloom in Galitzine’s gaze and in addition her ache when she realizes {that a} relationship within the public eye goes to take a toll on her daughter.

By the top it doesn’t actually matter whether or not Hayes is predicated on Harry Styles as a result of the lovable boy isn’t actually the purpose anyway. It’s how that cute boy makes the heroine really feel. And if she’s in love, then so are we.