Mix Tape review: Teresa Palmer and Jim Sturgess in music-led romantic drama

We all know music is evocative of memories past.

The association between a song or a band with a moment in our lives can have a heady effect, take us back to an era when everything seemed possible.

For Allison and Daniel, it was 1989 and New Order’s Bizarre Love Triangle was playing at a house party when they locked eyes. Sparks fly.

Decades later, they live on opposite ends of the world, she (Teresa Palmer) in Sydney, he (Jim Sturgess) still in their hometown of Sheffield, both now married to other people and with teenage children of their own.

But “their song” still works like a time machine. Mix Tape, the four-episode co-production between Australia and Ireland, is a romantic drama about that early love, and the paths not taken.

Daniel is a writer, and wants to start a book about a musician, despite his wife’s protestations that the last time he took on such an ambitious project, he became impossible to live with.

Allison is a novelist, and her debut novel is making waves, including in Sheffield, where the town is loudly laying claim to one of its daughters even though she hasn’t returned there in all the years since she left.

Daniel sees her book in the window, looks at the author’s photo and turns to Facebook, where he reconnects with her.

Mix Tape is an exploration of the lyrics of The Cure’s Lovesong, which also features heavily as part of the show’s soundtrack - “Whenever I’m alone with you, you make me feel like I am home again, whenever I’m alone with you, you make me feel like I am whole again”.

Allison and Daniel meant something to each in the past (played by Florence Hunt and Rory Walton-Smith in the 1989 timeline), and they both feel like they didn’t quite become the people they thought they would be because of this moment when their futures together diverged.

In order for the series to keep them as romantic heroes and not love-rats stepping outside of their marriages, the story has to create spouses that don’t fulfil their needs.

For Daniel, he and his wife (Sara Soulie) aren’t on the same wavelength.

But for Allison, her husband Michael (Ben Lawson) is arrogant, patronising and controlling, a walking red flag of unattractive male behaviours, and everyone else in her life – her daughter, her publisher, her friend – can all see how he diminishes her.

The show weaves the present day with flashbacks and their adult versions aren’t physically in the same space until the third episode, but the teens have effectively established a rapport that you do become invested in the fates of their middle-aged selves.

There are thoughtful details such as Allison’s challenging family circumstances in 1989, and the full horrors of why she left Sheffield is unspooled over the series, while the soundtrack also boasts the likes of Mental As Anything’s Live It Up, Psychedelic Furs’ Love My Way and Frente’s cover of Bizarre Love Triangle.

But there is this niggling dissatisfaction that the execution of the premise lacks nuance and sophistication.

Mix Tape is trying to make the case that Allison and Daniel’s second chance is a correction for what should’ve already been, but it doesn’t make allowances for how things actually turned out.

When Daniel gets whiny about the life he could’ve lived, he is self-indulgent and naïve – sorry, kids, daddy regrets everything that transpired for you to exist. It’s not attractive.

If we go back to those lyrics in Lovesong - “Whenever I’m alone with you, you make me feel like I am whole again” – it speaks to a co-dependency that suggests these two characters are less destined for each other and more looking for an escape from their current happiness by regressing to something that can’t ever be the same again.

Is that really a happy ending?

Mix Tape is streaming on Binge from June 12