'Florence Foster Jenkins': Meryl Streep at top form playing a terrible singer

You're never too old to start falling in love with Meryl Streep all over again.

In the fact-based music comedy Florence Foster Jenkins, the 19-time Oscar nominee is enchanting as one of the most lovable eccentrics in modern history - a woman panned by critics as the world's worst singer.

Streep, 67, is simply aglow as Jenkins, a Wilkes-Barre-born heiress who so loved opera that she couldn't stop herself from treating friends, employees - and eventually all of Manhattan - to the cacophonous, shrieking soprano she used to tear the soul out of classical music.

No one was safe from Jenkins' vocal assault, not Mozart, Léo Delibes, or Johann Strauss.

Hugh Grant is affable, gentle, and a little sad as her second husband, St. Clair Bayfield, whose energies are devoted to seeing that Jenkins is surrounded by people who play into her delusions. Among them are the wonderfully sleazy maestro Carlo Edwards (David Haig), conductor of the Metropolitan Opera, who gives Jenkins private singing lessons.

Directed with tremendous style and vibrant, buoyant energy by Stephen Frears (The Queen, High Fidelity), Florence Foster Jenkins is set during the last years of Jenkins' life - she died in 1944 at the age of 76.

A gifted pianist who lived in Philadelphia for 15 years, Jenkins was already in her 30s when she turned to singing, and well into her 40s when she began holding absurd little artistic cabarets for her friends. There, she created tableaux vivants, still-frame scenes from famous operas and plays set up with costumed actors - and Florence as the star.

In one amazing scene, which opens the film, she's an angel, held aloft on wires by several stagehands visibly exhausted by the heavy pulling.

Her musical evenings are such a great success - thanks to the money her husband doles out - that Jenkins gets it into her head that she must perform for the public. And not just any public. She decides to hold a concert at Carnegie Hall.

As good as Streep's performance gets - and it does soar - she's all but eclipsed by The Big Bang Theory's Simon Helberg, who gives a revelatory turn as Cosmé McMoon, a young pianist she hires as her accompanist.

Helberg plays the film's Everyman, a working-class Mexican American musician who has come to New York hoping to become a composer. He can't believe his luck when this ridiculously wealthy couple decides to hire him - until he hears Jenkins sing.

McMoon can't turn down the money, though, and before long, something like love develops between the oddball musician and his strange employer.

Along with the hilarity, there's a deep vein of tragedy that runs through Florence Foster Jenkins. It's beautifully nurtured by Frears and his players as they reveal the darker aspects of Jenkins' life with great subtlety.

An adventurous young woman, Jenkins was robbed of her sexuality in her 20s, when she contracted syphilis from her first husband. Her doctors told her she wouldn't make it to middle age - the pain alone would be unendurable. Or she would go mad.

Florence survived. Thanks to her love of music, she thrived. So what if the rest of the world couldn't stand to listen?

tirdad@phillynews.com

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Florence Foster Jenkins

*** ½ (Out of four stars)

• Directed by Stephen Frears. With Meryl Streep, Hugh Grant, Simon Helberg, Nina Arianda, Rebecca Ferguson. Distributed by Paramount Pictures.

• Running time: 1 hour, 50 mins.

• Parent's guide: PG-13 (brief suggestive material).

• Playing at: Area theaters.

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