\n<\/p>\n
Hayes Campbell, the dreamy protagonist of the new rom-com \u201cThe Idea of You,\u201d has a bit in common with the mega pop star Harry Styles:<\/p>\n
In the movie, Hayes, played by Nicholas Galitzine, is a member of August Moon, a boy band with tons of very ardent teen and tween girl fans. Styles was a member of a boy band called One Direction. You\u2019ve probably heard of it.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
Hayes is British. So is Harry Styles.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n
Hayes eventually quits his band and starts making soulful pop rock. So did Harry.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n
Hayes likes to date older women, and his relationship with a gallerist named Sol\u00e8ne Marchand (Anne Hathaway) is the backbone of the film. Harry, too, has been involved in tabloid-documented relationships with older women, most famously, the actress and director Olivia Wilde.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
So does \u201cThe Idea of You\u201d come off as an act of fan fiction? Bizarrely, no, even if the shadow of Styles does loom large over the whole project.<\/p>\n
Plenty of headlines have already described the movie as \u201cHarry Styles fan fiction,\u201d though Robinne Lee, the author of the 2017 novel on which it is based, is typically coy in interviews about whether the pop star inspired her book.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\u201cInspired is a strong word,\u201d Lee has said. The author, who is also an actress with degrees from Yale and Columbia Law School and perhaps best known for her appearances in films like \u201cHitch\u201d and \u201cFifty Shades Darker,\u201d has described encountering<\/a> \u201cthe face of a boy I\u2019d never seen in a band I\u2019d never paid attention to\u201d and thinking it was \u201cart.\u201d After the novel became a viral sensation, Lee told Vogue in 2020<\/a>, \u201cThis was never supposed to be a book about Harry Styles.\u201d In a piece for Time published this month, Lee argued<\/a> that \u201cassuming a novel with a fictional celebrity in a relationship must be based on an existing celebrity \u2014 in this case, the internet has decided, Harry Styles \u2014 is unimaginative at best and sexist at worst.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n She is certainly less explicit about a pop star connection than Anna Todd<\/a>, whose \u201cAfter\u201d series of novels started explicitly as Styles fan fiction on the platform Wattpad and have since been turned into a film franchise<\/a>. (It\u2019s a path that might be familiar to fans of \u201cFifty Shades,\u201d which started as \u201cTwilight\u201d fan fiction.) However, unlike \u201cThe Idea of You,\u201d the \u201cAfter\u201d series has nothing to do with a boy band. The Harry of \u201cAfter\u201d is a college student named Hardin, but when the first novel was published in 2014, the portrayal outraged some One Direction lovers with the way it turned Styles into a bad boy manipulating a young woman. One 14-year-old Styles fan<\/a> told The New York Times then: \u201cThe way Harry in this book is portrayed is disgusting.\u201d<\/p>\n On the other hand, Styles fans have embraced \u201cThe Idea of You\u201d as text that can feed their obsession. Kayla Kleinman, a social media manager at Bookshop.org, was not a Styles devotee when she first read the novel, but became one after finishing it during the pandemic. She felt \u201cemotionally attached\u201d to the book, and wanted the experience of reading it to continue, she said in an interview. So she sought out Styles\u2019s music. \u201cIn my head it felt like a continuation of the story even though I very much knew that they were not,\u201d she said. \u201cBut to me that next step was being like, \u2018OK, I\u2019m going to dive into this world as a thing to entertain myself.\u2019\u201d Now Kleinman has even gone to Harry Styles concerts with a friend she made from an \u201cIdea of You\u201d Facebook group.<\/p>\n The novel, it\u2019s worth noting, does more to distinguish between Harry and Hayes than the movie does. In Lee\u2019s version, Hayes is a boy from a posh upbringing who put together August Moon himself. In the film, which was adapted by the director Michael Showalter and his co-writer Jennifer Westfeldt, Hayes is cast in the group after auditioning, not unlike the way Styles was on the British version of \u201cThe X Factor\u201d before being selected for One Direction. (That said, the book features considerable discussion of Hayes\u2019s dimples, which feels like a direct reference to Styles\u2019s looks.)<\/p>\n But while these changes align the Hayes onscreen with the Harry of reality, they surprisingly don\u2019t make the movie indebted to Styles. Rather, they just make it more grounded than Lee\u2019s novel, which sometimes comes across as a list of detailed descriptions of the furnishings of luxury hotels along with copious sex scenes.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The film understands that the fantasy of a Harry Styles type is a potent one. Styles has earned the affection of millions not just because he\u2019s attractive and has a nice singing voice and ambitious glam-rock style. There is an idea perpetuated by his fandom that he\u2019s accepting and, most of all, kind. (He even recorded a song, released after the \u201cIdea of You\u201d novel, called \u201cTreat People With Kindness.\u201d) That kindness is filtered through the new film.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n As the movie opens, Sol\u00e8ne, divorced and on the verge of turning 40, steps in when her ex (Reid Scott) has last-minute plans that prevent him from taking their teenage daughter, Izzy (Ella Rubin), to Coachella. Izzy (a middle schooler in the novel, but aged up here) is no longer enamored with August Moon and is now into female singer-songwriter types, but her rich, inattentive dad has paid for a meet-and-greet with the band.<\/p>\n Sol\u00e8ne then meets cute with Hayes when she accidentally wanders into his trailer, thinking it\u2019s a public restroom. He\u2019s charmed and starts to pursue her by visiting her gallery in the reliably hip Silver Lake neighborhood in Los Angeles, where he looks upon her with wonder as she explains the art to him.<\/p>\n