'Daisy Jones & The Six' review: Great acting, great music

WHAT IT'S ABOUT The Laurel Canyon music scene comes alive in this 10-part adaptation of "Daisy Jones & The Six," the 2019 novel by Taylor Jenkins Reid about a fictional '70s band that emerges from the Hollywood Hills to leave a lasting pop cultural legacy.

The miniseries comes from Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber (the latter a Great Neck native), the creative partners behind "500 Days of Summer" and other hits of the past decade-plus.

The story follows the Dunne brothers, Billy (Sam Claflin) and Graham (Will Harrison), who form a band with their friends Eddie Roundtree (Josh Whitehouse) and Warren Rojas (Sebastian Chacon) in their native Pittsburgh. They head west, add keyboardist Karen Sirko (Suki Waterhouse), dub themselves The Six, and have a go at stardom.

Simultaneously on the SoCal scene, the prodigiously talented singer/songwriter and frontwoman Daisy Jones (Riley Keough) pursues her own path toward finding an audience.

One night, the iconic producer Teddy Price (Tom Wright), who has been working separately with both Daisy Jones and The Six, has a bout of inspiration and brings them together.

MY SAY There's so much to appreciate about "Daisy Jones & The Six" from the standpoint of how the showrunners and their directors resurrect a world that now lives largely in the popular imagination.

The series captures that  almost indefinable alchemy that made this place so special, that gave the world Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, The Byrds and so many of the other legends that lived and congregated there. That's not to mention Fleetwood Mac, a loose inspiration for the story.

It's translated in scenes tinged with the genuine magic of musical creation: an impromptu, group singalong during a power outage; the transcendent feeling of finding your true artistic partner and writing and singing together for the first time. 

It also shines through in the close relationships that form between these characters, including how they mutually confront their most raw and vulnerable moments, and the ways in which that shows the importance of a vibrant support network for any person to be truly their best professional and personal self.

A sense of mystery looms over it all: the story begins by establishing that Daisy Jones & The Six were a short-lived sensation, breaking up for good after a sold-out 1977 show at Soldier Field in Chicago. It's structured as a behind-the-scenes documentary made 20 years later, with the principal characters addressing the camera and sharing their own reflections, memories and opinions on what happened during this transformative moment.

A viewing of the first five episodes establishes a slow-burn approach toward unpacking how it all became so good and then went so wrong. But these are such compelling characters that there's no hurry for answers.

Keough and Claflin in particular play Daisy and Billy with intelligence and grace, carrying the vulnerability of their deep flaws and unceasing pain alongside the sort of extreme self-confidence required to get up on stage and change the world, even for a moment.

BOTTOM LINE Great acting, great storytelling and great music.