Snub concussion

How Nala Sinephro’s original score transformed ‘The Smashing Machine’

Snub talk is the most useful byproduct of any awards show. If our experience of an art form broadens by arguing over who’s been shut out of the party, everybody wins. To that point, I can already feel the discussion surrounding Sunday’s Oscars cooling into silence, but I’m still heated that nobody’s talking about the score of The Smashing Machine by the Belgian jazz musician Nala Sinephro.

The Smashing Machine — director Benny Safdie’s biopic of pioneering MMA fighter Mark Kerr, played by Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson — was nominated for one prize at Sunday’s Academy Awards, best makeup and hairstyling, and lost. Safdie’s team did commendable work turning the Rock’s face into a bloodied Rawlings catcher’s mitt, but if anyone deserves recognition for transforming this film, it’s Sinephro. Whenever her shimmery gusts of harp, flute and synthesizer float into the film’s knuckly combat scenes with pastel weightlessness, she isn’t playing against type. Instead, Sinephro’s music transports us inside Kerr’s concussed headspace, changing the meaning of the film.

Without her, The Smashing Machine is drab and thin. Kerr’s ambitions are uncomplicated. His relationships stay shallow. The scenery — Arizona to Japan — feels anonymous. In a sudden bout of toxic relationship drama, Kerr’s girlfriend Dawn (Emily Blunt) sneers, “I don’t think you know a damn thing about me.” She’s right. Nobody does. That’s because our awareness of this world only expands as far as Kerr’s — a limitation we can feel whenever Sinephro’s melodies start to twinkle near the smothered edge of our senses. In the film’s most baffling and wondrous scene, Sinephro herself appears in the fighter’s ring, seated at her harp, singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” through dreamlike layers of echo. The only way to understand this impossible occurrence is that we’re experiencing it through Kerr’s rosy, busted memory.

When The Smashing Machine soundtrack finally dropped on vinyl last Friday, I’d hoped my copy would contain an unlisted version of that exquisite “Banner.” No dice. Maybe Sinephro isn’t trying to ride too hard for America right now. I get that. But I also worry that A24 and Warp Records undervalued this recording, blowing up its yellow-text-black-square streaming thumbnail into an album jacket that no one would mistake for a piece of an Oscar campaign. At best, the colors evoke a Post-It note stuck to the void that reads: “Don’t forget that this record smokes Daniel Lopatin’s score for Marty Supreme.”

Josh and Benny Safdie presumably decoupled last year with the idea of directing two different kinds of films, but both The Smashing Machine and Marty Supreme ended up leaning hard into their soundtracks. What’s different with The Smashing Machine is that Sinephro’s music needs the movie, too. By steering her delicate sense of melody through the opiated brain of a brutalized combat fighter, her compositions gain a metaphysical heft — the sound of survival through disassociation, the music of a battered omni-consciousness, jock jams pummeled into lullabies, ambient tragedy jazz, the third eye of the tiger.