Spoiler Alert!
In Flora and Son, Jeff is an American guitar tutor giving Flora guitar lessons via video calls. Played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, the character of Jeff has an interesting journey in the Apple TV+ film, as he starts teaching Flora, who unlocks something in him that he thought was lost forever.
Flora and Son is a musical comedy-drama film written and directed by John Carney. The Apple TV+ film follows the story of Flora, a single mother trying to figure out how to keep her delinquent son away from illegal activities so that he doesn’t end up in jail. That’s when she finds a guitar and tries to make her son interested in music but when that doesn’t work out she starts learning the guitar herself. The film also stars Eve Hewson, Jack Reynor, and Orén Kinlan.
The first time we are introduced to Jeff is when Flora is looking for guitar tutorials online and ends up on Jeff’s video. But she ignores it at first because the video is just an ad for Jeff’s tuition business which costs $20.
Soon, we see Flora on a video call with Jeff. Their first meeting doesn’t go well as Flora has her guard up and is talking flirtatiously and ends up asking him to take his shirt off, to which Jeff replies by disconnecting the call.
Flora apologizes to Jeff for that via text and sends him an image that can’t be characterized as entirely appropriate, but Jeff seems to have forgiven Flora as he replies to her texts saying that he is ready to give her another chance if she doesn’t whine or disturb his lessons.
Jeff even sings her a song that Flora thinks Jeff has written himself, but Jeff later confesses that it wasn’t his song and he didn’t correct her because he just wanted to see what it would feel like to have written a song like that. After hearing Jeff’s confession Flora asks him to play one of his own songs and he complies.
Jeff plays his song for Flora but she isn’t really moved by it and she says that to Jeff, while not in exactly those words Jeff says to Flora that he knows that his song isn’t that good and it isn’t able to move people. He also says if everyone was as honest as her he wouldn’t have wasted over a decade of his life trying to make it in the music business.
In the next lesson, Flora gives Jeff some suggestions to fix his song and even a lyric which could probably fix the song and she says that he can think about changing the song if he likes her lyrics. After implementing the changes Jeff and Flora both sing the song and it’s beautiful.
By this time in the film, Jeff and Flora have clearly fallen for each other. During a lesson, they discuss their lives and after hearing what Flora has gone through in her life he tells her that he was an alcoholic and he was even drunk during his kid’s birth.
After some more flirty conversations, Flora suggests that she could come to visit him in LA, and this idea is met with some resistance from Jeff but he also seems to want to meet Flora. While Flora’s plans to go to LA fall apart because of her son Max’s arrest, they do continue with their lessons and their relationship deepens.
When Flora tells Jeff that she is not coming to LA, he reveals to her that he has written a song for Flora. This is the first song he has written in a long time and it is because of her that he found the courage within himself to put himself out there for the world to see.
In the final moments of the film, we see Jeff joining Flora, Max, and Flora’s ex-husband through a video call to sing a song in front of an Irish pub. We can hear the song Jeff wrote for Flora as the credits roll and the film ends.
Jeff seems to be in a great position in life at the beginning if compared to Flora and her son. It is slowly revealed that he is also struggling and is in despair over losing his dream. By the end of the film, we see a new light in him and while we don’t really see him and Flora ending up together by the end there is still a possibility of it happening and even if it doesn’t happen at least they brought something positive in each other’s lives.