The best cry

If you swallowed all your machismo (assuming you're a man) and admitted to someone you cried during a movie, you might expect this as a follow-up question:

"Oh, which part?"

But they might not expect your answer:

"The closing credits."

That is in fact what happened to me Monday night when I saw Hearts Beat Loud, a movie I'd heard buzzed about as "this year's Sing Street." Despite this description, I went anyway. I'm a huge fan of John Carney's Once, and I even quite like his follow-up, Begin Again. I wasn't really on board for Sing Street. Don't know why.

And Hearts Beat Loud didn't take off for me at the start. It took me a while to decide whether I was watching a good movie or not. (A while = 15 minutes.) Once I started nodding my head at all the things the movie was doing right, which was everything, I knew I was loving it. I even really enjoyed the contributions of former amateur Sasha Lane, who bothered me in American Honey and a movie I saw a few weeks ago, The Miseducation of Cameron Post.

As the emotional resonance of the movie, particularly its relationship between a father and his daughter, continue to build toward a crescendo, I sat there in that kind of happy fugue you slip into when you are in the grasp of a movie that is working on you on all levels.

And when the last image faded to black, I engaged in a brief but unmistakeable bout of those small convulsions we call tears.

This also happened with my #1 movie of 2017, A Ghost Story. Hearts Beat Loud is not a contender for my top spot this year, but it does so many things right, and works on you so gradually, that the end result when the bow was tied on the movie was the same kind of small emotional outpouring.

Like applause, only wetter.

And there's something so pure about crying when a movie's credits roll. It can't be cheapened by chalking the tears up to a superior instance of emotional manipulation. If a director and a cast get it just right, they can do things even in bad movies that will make you well up. You may resent it afterward, but in that moment it works like gangbusters.

A credits cry is something different. It's usually a response to the entire movie, not just one superior moment.

It's the very rare instance that the very last moment of a movie is its emotional climax, at least in the way we usually think of such things -- a tear-jerking speech, a sad farewell, that kind of thing. Usually you get that moment somewhere in the last 15 minutes, but not at the very, very end.

So crying when you see the director's name come up on the screen is the equivalent of saying "Nailed it." Even great movies can stumble a bit with their last shot, can wrap up in ways that we don't find to be 100% perfect. There are egregious examples, like the rat running along the railing in The Departed, but there are hundreds of lesser examples of movies not knowing what their last shot should be or how to execute it.

The credits cry is kind of like saying "Yes, and that last shot was perfect. Bravo. You did it."

Don't need to belabor this probably.

If you haven't done so, see Hearts Beat Loud. Your mileage may vary on the credits tears. Though probably not if you're a dad like I am.

You can consider it this year's Sing Street if you like Sing Street and that helps you. I consider it exactly what its poster claims it to be: "The feel good movie we need right now."