Grace of My Heart

In GRACE OF MY HEART, Edna Buxton (Illeana Douglas) is the heiress of a wealthy Pennsylvania steel family who wants to be a singer/songwriter. But it's the late 1950s, and her family would prefer that she gets married and settles down. But when she wins a singing contest where first prize is the chance to record a demo in New York City for a record label, Edna moves to the city. She's crushed to learn that the market is glutted with female singers, but the strength of the song she has written leads the producer to put her in contact with one Joel Milner (John Turturro), a fast-talking record producer who gives her song to an all-male African-American singing group, and the song becomes a hit. Milner changes her name to Denise Waverly and invents a blue-collar background for her. She begins work as a songwriter in the legendary Brill Building, where she meets and begins a relationship both in and out of the studio with fellow songwriter Howard Caszatt (Eric Stoltz), with whom she writes songs, marries, and has children. After finding him in bed with another woman, Waverly leaves Caszatt and begins writing songs with a former rival, Cheryl Steed, with whom she writes a hit song for the pop star Kelly Porter called "My Secret Love," a song inspired from witnessing Porter get into an argument with her lesbian lover in the studio. As the 1960s go on, Waverly meets and falls in love with Jay Phillips (Matt Dillon), a brilliant but troubled songwriter who's trying to get his own group beyond its California-surf-song origins. They move in together, but as Phillips begins to lose hold on his sanity as he finds it impossible to create the music that's in his head, he commits suicide by drowning in the ocean. Crushed over her failures in both the music industry and in love, Waverly joins a commune, and it's not until Milner finds her there and tries to help her that she finds the courage to record her own album that chronicles her loves and losses.