I always thought that this sweet, musical movie deserved a better reception than it got but I guess in 1996 people were more interested in Kurt Cobain’s still fresh suicide than a look 40 years back. There must be something to it if Marty Scorsese put his name on as executive producer, right?

Grace of My Heart, written and directed by Allison Anders, uses the real life of singer/songwriter Carole King as its framework/jumping off point for Anders to explore life of a woman in the music business from the ’50s through the ’70s. King was a key member of the Brill Building songwriting crew, coming up with hundreds of hits–in partnership with first husband Gerry Goffin–for groups as diverse as the Shirelles’ “Will You Love Me Tomorrow,” Bobby Vee’s “Take Good Care of My Baby,” Little Eva’s “The Locomotion,” (later turned into a hard rock

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classic by Grand Funk Railroad), the Chiffons’ “One Fine Day,” the Monkees’ “Pleasant Valley Sunday,” the Drifters’ “Up on the Roof,” and Aretha Franklin’s “(You Make Me Feel) Like a Natural Woman.”

But King always wanted to be a singer. Numerous records she made flopped until, of course, her titanic megaseller Tapestry broke most chart standards. Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon came along two years later and rewrote the books but for awhile she was as big as any act. King married again in the mid-70s; sadly her husband ODed just a year later and she retreated to Idaho for many years.

Illeana Douglas’s Denise Waverly is a Philadelphia steel hieress (nee Edna Buxton) and not a Brooklynite like King but she quickly partners and falls in love with Eric Stoltz’s beatnik wanna-be Howard Cazsatt, indicated by the annoying chinhair Stoltz wears and the watered downMarxist rhetoric he spouts during post-coital cuddling. Eventually, she walks in on him having sex with some unnamed tramp as their newborn naps in a crib at the foot of the bed.

She moves on to an affair with a married man of her own, an Alan Freed-like radio DJ, but he too leaves her in the lurch. Finally, her boss (an underwhelming John Turturro) gets her a one shot record deal as an attempt to get her back from Self Pity Land, with Brian Wilson Jay Phillips (Matt Dillon, who seemed to be taking the same drugs Wilson used back in the ’60s) to produce it. Of course they fall in love but Wilson Phillips goes off the deep end, literally here, walking into the surf with no board.

One ticket, one way, for Self Pity Land! Denise takes her daughter, her babysitter and the babysitter’s little son from a beach house in Malibu to a commune so they can plant vegetables and meditate in the mud for half a year until Turturro show up again to talkher out of her self-absorbed misery. The kids are just happy to get hamburger and fries for dinner. Denise dusts herself off and makes a platinum-seller that even her hoity-toity mom finally approves of.

Grace is better than this sounds. There is a bit of cliche in how Douglas keeps falling for the same type of guy and the ending is a little happily ever after, its not a perfect film. But Douglas, for once playing the lead and not the best friend or best friend’s wife, shows that she can act, given a chance. Sort of how King showed she could be the star, eh? And Anders includes dark touches honestly, like the reaction to the film’s version of the Shirelle’s controversial abusive love song and Phillips’ descent into madness.

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