Sometimes a piece of music resonates so deeply it seems to be singing from inside you. The music is your own — you are confident it is music you would have written, had you been in the habit of writing music.

The movie starts with music — Benjamin Britten’s A Young person’s Guide to the Orchestra being played on a child’s portable record player. Delicate, yet robust — reanimating things past, painting pictures with innocence (and a little bit of sad, jaded reality), Moonrise Kingdom is a tone poem that will stay with you long after the movie is over. The story of two 12 year olds, running away together into the wilder parts of a small island on which the entire story unfolds, is captured with a simplicity and joy that defies words. But listening to The Heroic Weather-Conditions of the Universe again, I am drawn back into the story. Clearly inspired by Britten’s piece and the story unfolded in the movie, the simplicity of Desplat’s song almost without words, captures the tale completely, vividly.

It was at the end of a day with disappointments that I went to see the movie “Moonrise Kingdom”. Letting go, I found the almost-pure innocence of a bygone era singing to me a vivid, soul-felt song, healing me with a curious kind of hope.

In the Moonrise Kingdom there reigns disarming honesty, simplicity, sweetness, and a vision of reality that clings to hope.