She copes by hashing out theoretical top five lists (top five desert island artists, top five all-time heartbreaks) with her employees/best friends Simon (David H Holmes) and Cherise (a scene-stealing Da’Vine Joy Randolph), and half-hearted relationships with men she reduces to cliches – a hot musician (Thomas Doherty, in a role originally played by Kravitz’s mother, Lisa Bonet) and Nice Guy With A Prius Clyde (Jake Lacy). The show also extends the length, perhaps to its detriment over 10 half-hour episodes, Rob stews over her ex-fiance Mac (Kingsley Ben-Adir), who dumped her a year ago and recently moved back to the city. The gender flip smartly reorients the music of the movie now, a black, queer woman (one of Rob’s top five ex-lovers is a woman) dictates the terms of taste and asserts the vibe, even if her pop culture awareness is almost entirely music-centric (a series-long bit involves Rob talking about but never actually watching The Sopranos, a choice to ignore a television touchstone that feels pointed and also very much something I have done). This version switches Chicago for Crown Heights (and a little Williamsburg), and the Everyman Cusack for ethereal Kravitz, it keeps Rob’s fourth-wall breaks, through which to dismiss someone or something, and a plan to revisit past heartbreaks to explain how she’s alone by age 30. The Hulu show re-envisions the 2000 movie – itself an adaptation of a 1995 Nick Hornby novel set in 1980s London – in which John Cusack plays a self-absorbed record store owner relitigating his romantic past to get over an ex. The result is a show which is sometimes grating yet sneakily beguiling, in the way that beautiful, curated messiness can be. She has, in other words, all the enviable panache of a rockstar child her biggest concern is her fixation with the man who dumped her a year prior, yet High Fidelity tries – and tries very hard, sometimes entertainingly – to make you feel her romantic miscalculations are an all-consuming, relatable pain.
She dresses in thoughtless yet perfect thrifted outfits, owns a (seemingly successful) record shop employing her two best friends, has a spacious Brooklyn apartment filled with vinyls and a usable bathtub, and can easily school anyone’s music knowledge while slinging back whiskey neats.
She is, first of all, played by Zoë Kravitz, daughter of Lenny Kravitz and an actor of effortless cool. R ob Brooks, the star of Hulu’s reimagining of High Fidelity, is a difficult protagonist to have sympathy for.
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