When Nick Hornby’s novel High Fidelity debuted in 1995, many readers were charmed by protagonist Rob, a nebbishy London record-store owner and frequently jilted lover going back through his Rolodex of exes to figure out what went wrong in his most recent relationship. The New York Times reviewer Mark Jolly called Rob a figure of “Prufrockian pathos,” and John Cusack’s portrayal of him in the 2000 film version of High Fidelity is frequently cited as a dweeby crush, a proto–Seth Cohen for the vinyl-hoarding age.
On Valentine’s Day, Rob was reborn in a Hulu reboot of High Fidelity that delivers plenty of laughs and achingly relatable moments. Zoë Kravitz plays a female version of Rob, and the job is the same; she runs Championship Vinyl, a record store in Crown Heights. The heartbreaks are the same, albeit updated for a more progressive generation; she’s shot down by a procession of lovers, both male and female. I watched the first episode alone on Valentine’s Day eve (not at all sad!), and I loved it, but there was one problem I just couldn’t get over: the Kravitz Factor.
Simply put, Kravitz is way too cool to properly embody a downtrodden no-hoper who’s not quite sure of her place in life. This is Zoë Kravitz we’re talking about, the style icon and modern-day It girl whose every grooming decision seems to spark a trend. She’s going to be Catwoman, for God’s sake!
Of course, even the hippest among us aren’t immune to rejection. But when Rob complains of her former girlfriend, “It wasn’t just that I wasn’t glamorous or interesting enough for Cat, which I wasn’t,” I couldn’t help it. You’re Zoë Kravitz!, I mentally screamed at the TV, tearing at my hair as I struggled to reconcile these lines coming from one of the most glamorous and interesting actors alive. (She has her own YSL lipstick line! She’s in an electropop band! Catwoman!) Believing that even an adolescent version of Zoë Kravitz would be romantically rebuffed felt like a psychic contortion. Luckily for my mental health, Twitter had this issue too:
Of course, there’s a long filmic history of gorgeous, chic actors putting on glasses or going makeup-free to become “nerds,” from Rachael Leigh Cook in She’s All That to Sandra Bullock in Miss Congeniality. What are TV shows and movies supposed to do? Cast women who aren’t conventionally attractive in those roles? Perish the thought! Still, Kravitz’s je ne sais quoi goes beyond physical attractiveness; her coolness is an elemental state of being, and it’s not something she can obscure with a grungy T-shirt and a pair of jeans. With parents like Lenny Kravitz and original High Fidelity star Lisa Bonet, she was predisposed to it from birth, the way other families pass down a history of elevated cholesterol.
Frankly, I’m not sure Kravitz channels the esprit de loser that made the book and the original film so relatable. The original Rob is, by 2020 standards, a huge schmuck (remember when he dumps a girl in high school for not having sex with him and then doesn’t really apologize as an adult?), but he and his record-shop coworkers embodied a kind of collective, communal dork-dom that felt almost cozy.
Kravitz’s rapport with her coworkers Cherise and Simon (Da’Vine Joy Randolph and David H. Holmes, respectively) is a joy to watch, but their chemistry doesn’t exactly make Rob seem like bad news either. As hard as Kravitz works to dim her light in High Fidelity, she doesn’t quite succeed; to her credit, though, her Rob is way more magnetic onscreen than the original, and it’s still fun to watch her try.