A STAR-MAKING TURN FOR EVE HEWSON IN THE FEEL-GOOD 'FLORA AND SON'

John Carney, the Irish filmmaker of “Once,” “Sing Street” and “Begin Again,” makes the movie version of “three chords and the truth.”

His films, unabashedly earnest, feel-good movies for cynical times, are lo-fi musicals that tell simple stories, charmingly. There are love interests, usually. But the abiding romance is for music. His films are the sort that would be easier to dismiss as “sentimental” if his central belief — in the redemptive power of music — didn’t happen to be kinda true.

The song remains much the same in Carney’s latest charmer, “Flora and Son,” starring Eve Hewson as a working-class single mother in Dublin who takes up guitar lessons. Flora’s initial instinct when she snags a beat-up acoustic guitar out of a dumpster, is to give it to her troubled 14-year-old son, Max (Orén Kinlan) as a day-late birthday present. Max, though, is nonplussed.

“You expect me to turn into Ed (expletive) Sheeran?” he says.