People who don’t like musicals always fall back on the Realism Argument, contending that in real life we don’t start singing during conversations or solo walks in the Alps or whenever. This argument can be answered in a variety of ways: Don’t most of us have a soundtrack on shuffle in our heads? More important, who says musicals are supposed to be realistic?

The indie musical, embodied by the 2006 sleeper Once, has tried to sneak around the argument. In these movies people sing because they’re musicians; they sidle up to music, they shrug their way through a tune. They emphatically do not plant their feet and belt out a showstopper in the Broadway tradition. That sort of modesty (or is it embarrassment?) can be effective, although just as often the result feels as artificial as a Rodgers and Hammerstein showstopper. Case in point: Song One, in which music threads through the tale of a street busker who spends most of the film in a coma. I always feel bad for actors cast as coma victims, so let’s mention his name here: Ben Rosenfield plays Henry, a starving musician who ends up in the hospital after an accident. His sister Franny (Anne Hathaway) returns from studying anthropology in the Middle East to tend to him; also at the bedside is their mother (Mary Steenburgen), a stock irresponsible-ex-hippie character.

Franny listens to her brother’s music and frequents his favorite haunts—they’d been slightly estranged, and the script insists she does this to get to know him better. She also strikes up a bond with Henry’s hero, a sensitive folkie songwriter named James Forester (Johnny Flynn). He’s got sensitivity, musical chops, and an accent, which means he doesn’t have to shower much to succeed with women. They do some impromptu singing together and grow close. The kid stays in the coma.

You can see that writer/director Kate Barker-Froyland is sincere, and in fact the film is admirable for avoiding conventional A-B-C plotting; scenes tend to drift into each other in an unpredictable way, and the movie’s got a dark, tough look. But there’s something just too precious about it all, and there’s also Anne Hathaway. I do not dislike the Internet-reviled Hathaway, who won an Oscar for her last musical, Les Miserables. But introspection and angst do not sit easily with her super-square personality, and Song One tends to vanish into her very earnest eyes, like a song that trails off in the air.

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SONG ONE Opens Fri., Jan 23 at Sundance Cinemas. Rated PG-13. 88 minutes.