What's On Keean Johnson And Madeline Brewer's Own Ultimate Playlist Of Noise?

“I don't know if I might live without the crunch of a pickle,” Madeline Brewer says. Actress is talking by means of the food sounds she’d miss if she suddenly lost her sense of hearing, a threat that looms over her character’s companion in the new Hulu film, The Ultimate Playlist of Noise, out Friday (January 15). As Wendy, a singer-songwriter grappling with her chosen career’s diminishing returns, she finds a kindred wanderer in Marcus, a high-school student with a life-saving operation scheduled to remove tumors in his brain.


An unfortunate complication, though, is that the surgery will render the music-obsessed, playlist-making Marcus, played by Euphoria’s Keean Johnson, totally deaf. No more doubling up on headphones for both music and ambience — “What in the event you desire to listen to Neil Young while roasting marshmallows in the Smoky Mountains?” Marcus asks early on — no more jaunts to be able to see the excellently named (fictional) musical group Sharkitecture, and no more chances to hear his late brother’s own songs captured before he died.


“I began out as a dancer before I even knew that you can act, and thus needless to say my hearing is one of my very crucial senses to me,” Johnson tells MTV News on a Zoom call with Brewer. “I don't know if I'm the kind of actor that likes to think about me personally, although just the thought of losing something that is so powerful is pretty traumatic to think about.”


Realizing the clock is ticking, Marcus sets out on a roadtrip across the United States with his brother’s tape recorder and also a plan: He’ll record all his preference sounds — roaring thunderstorms, dozens of soda cans cracking open simultaneously, knocking bowling pins — and compile the titular playlist as a farewell to his operational ears. That’s once Wendy, likewise on the run, quite literally crashes into his life, and before long, she assists the him capture the sounds he’ll miss, even as she navigates her own path and personalized reasons for wanting to escape her life.


“She is, for a brief time, Marcus's manic pixie dream girl,” Brewer admits, “but you visualize that fall apart once you identify that that's not real. So, that element was really cool, actually, to get to have my Natalie Portman in Garden State moments, yet then to ground it a little. She teaches him a really essential lesson that life is tough, and also you have got to be trustworthy, and also you must be real, so you have got to roll with the punches.”


piece of what draws Marcus to Wendy is her onstage aura, seen early in the film as she performs the yearning “Something to Believe In,” one of two original tunes penned by Wet’s Kelly Zutrau and sung by Brewer. In a pivotal scene, Marcus watches Wendy, transfixed, and wonders about the possibility of “love at first sound.” Then, he drops to the floor amid a seizure, revealing the severity of his condition. Before that, Wendy captivates him with her sound, something Brewer had to make for: “I’m not someone who gets onstage by myself with my guitar and just lets it rip. That is so terrifying to me. I was very frightened. Also, I don't play the guitar. It was just all really daunting for me, although it looks beautiful.”


Daunting, also, is the question of what sounds each actor would place on their own hypothetical Ultimate Playlists of Noise. So before we get to Brewer’s pickle and the ambient and environmental sounds they’d miss if they lost their hearing, an easier ask: What’s the critical music they wouldn’t have the ability to live without?


Brewer mentions her choices quickly: SZA’s Ctrl and Alopecia by experimental rap sort Why? She also evokes a songwriting icon that Wendy would likely agree with: “I truthful to god cannot live without Joni Mitchell. I can't get through an emotional experience without Joni Mitchell's words in my life.” Johnson’s got his ears on the Fugees’s seminal 1997 hip-hop album The Score along with anything from “very, very old classical to the new wave of hip hop.”


And then there’s the more abstract stuff.


“I have caller ID,” Brewer says, “and every time my mom calls me and leaves me a voicemail, she says, ‘Hey Furious, it's mom.’ [I’m like,] I've known your voice since I was in the womb. I know who you are. I have a few of these and then some happy-birthday ones from companions and loved ones I would miss hearing.”


Johnson’s sentimental sound choice is also related to his family member, though it’s much less about a particular message of love than an impressionistic representation of it. “We've got some land up in Colorado Springs, since I was about 5 or 6 years old,” he says, on which they built a tiny cabin. “There's no insulation or anything like that. It's at the best of this mountain, and any time these huge storms come through, the wind is so loud that it shakes the residence and you also hear this really, really loud, high-pitched wind sound. Those nostalgic sounds, where the second I go back and I hear that again, it just gives me the memories from all those different years.”


because the pair talk about the film, just as Marcus journeys to make “a going-away party for ears, with all my main go to sounds invited,” Brewer's reminded of the extraordinary moment we're still living in due to COVID-19 safety concerns, away from the calming, ambient sonic backdrops of people living their lives that we used to take for granted. “I miss the sound of walking into a music venue or a bar where live music is playing. Just the buzz, and the music, and the people, and the conversation,” she says, setting a familiar scene. “Ordering drinks at the bar, and she's crying about someone, and it's just chaotic and pretty, and everybody's living different lives simultaneously in this tiny sweaty space, and there's music, and there's creation, and folks are falling in love, and folks are falling out of love. And I love it. I miss the world.”


Before time's up, there's a reminder of that world. Johnson's cat Shabby barges into his room as he talks, rolling a clattering ball around to briefly interject the call and cause some smiles and quick laughs. One more ambient sound to miss as soon as it's gone.