Adam Driver Singing Sondheim in Marriage Story Deserves Every Award

Noah Baumbach’s brand-new divorce movie Marriage Story doesn’t have a whole lot of upbeat moments to offset the intensity of its script, so when they do come, they’re particularly delightful.

The movie—which stars Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson as Charlie and Nicole, a director-actress pair making their way through a painful divorce—is pretty much one gut punch after another, with the potential exception of a brief scene in which Nicole, her mother, and her sister (Julie Hagerty and Merritt Wever, respectively) perform “You Could Drive a Person Crazy” from Stephen Sondheim’s 1970 musical Company.

This upbeat song gets a reprise of sorts toward the end of the film, when Charlie takes the mic at a bar with his theater friends and absolutely nails the hell out of “Being Alive,” a notoriously difficult song to sing. (If you’re stepping into Barbra Streisand’s shoes, you better be ready to commit.) He goes full Broadway ham at first, to the point where you can imagine he might have starred in his share of high school theater, but it ends up going somewhere else altogether.

Unlike Nicole’s song, Charlie’s doesn’t end on a playful or funny note; it’s completely heartfelt, particularly by the end, and you can hear every shred of longing, anger, and disappointment as he sings.

Baumbach said in an interview with Indiewire that he’d long planned for Driver to sing in the film: “It’s good because it’s human,” he said, adding, “I wanted the song to have the same function songs do in musicals: The character arrives at another place by the end of the song.”

Pathos aside, the internet simply couldn’t help melting down over Driver’s theater-geek-tastic rendition of Sondheim. Here are our favorite tweets on the matter below:

Originally Appeared on Vogue