In awe of the talent displayed, Thomas Seyr (Romain Duris) watches a documentary on television that shows a pianist’s hands in slow motion as they slip down the keyboard with an eerie organic liquidity. Thomas himself is nothing like this; in fact, he is just the opposite: a wound up pile of nervous, almost schizophrenic energy. Unfulfilled following in his father’s footsteps as a racketeering realty agent, Thomas takes advantage of a chance meeting with the agent of his deceased mother—who, under the auspices of a moody husband and a domineering agent was an eccentric concert pianist—to sit down again at the keyboard. Finding his skill level frustratingly stunted after years away from the keys, Thomas hires a tutor (Linh Dan Pham) and trickily tries to juggle a life as a bad person—beating and cheating people out of their houses, covering for his friend’s cheating, doing drugs, and passively supporting his father’s indiscretions—with a more affirming life dedicated to the piano.

Jacques Audriard’s film The Beat That My Heart Skipped, based on a James Toback film from 1970 with which I have no familiarity, is a nervously energetic, consistently arresting but not particularly insightful picture of a personality in crisis. Romain Duris is truly the star here, as the film is based entirely on his flucuating anxiety and the way it ebbs and flows from the nasty moods inspired by backroom business deals or family trouble to the sheer exultation of accomplishing something at the piano or seducing a beautiful woman. Thomas' dependency on life models, ranging from his father's violence, to his mother's psychologically damaged passion, his co-workers blackheartedness, and his tutor's patient teaching, bounces him around in a world of moral binaries, each wrestling to dominate his personality. More often than not, Thomas’ navigation of moral territory in the film’s script—adapted by Audriard and his usually co-writer Tonino Benacquist—while being the crux of his apparent character's attempt at redemption, is too schematized and simplified (though they leave character backgrounds tantalizingly obscure). But the ease and fun of the film’s piano motif (black and white keys, mixtures of speed and stillness, art and aggression—and so on) and Duris’ sweatily intense portrayal give the film a wonderful urgency and are often enough to propel the film forward without any earned epiphanies.