N.J. director’s ‘O’Dessa’ rock opera stars Sadie Sink as an epic guitar hero

Geremy Jasper has wanted to make a rock opera for the better part of 20 years.

But it wasn’t until he watched Sadie Sink levitating with her eyes rolled back, running from a murderous, soul-eating monster in “Stranger Things,” that he saw his rock star.

The flame-haired young actor’s scenes in the Netflix series, set to Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill,” were so powerful they sent the 1985 song to the top of the charts and into the playlists of a younger generation.

“That was one of the first moments I really kind of knew who Sadie was,” Jasper tells NJ Advance Media. “It was one of those zeitgeisty kind of mega moments. That really introduced me to who this force was.”

Then he heard her sing.

That settled it — Sink would be the hero of Jasper’s new musical film “O’Dessa.”

Making the movie has been an utter obsession for the writer-director from New Jersey.

Finding his O’Dessa was everything.

In fact, before he saw Sink perform a song he wrote, he thought the film might never get made.

Echoes of Sink’s fortitude as Max Mayfield, her character from “Stranger Things,” can be seen in her sheer conviction as O’Dessa, the musical savior of his epic tale.

“She lights up the screen, that’s for sure,” Jasper says.

Sink’s 2022 viral moment in the Netflix series highlighted not just the timeless quality of Bush’s music, but also the young actor’s formidable presence.

“I think we cast her a year after that,” Jasper says. “And, God, were we lucky. I think there’s only one person on the planet that can really do this role, because it asks so much.”

“O’Dessa,” the fulfillment of Jasper’s rock opera vision, will be streaming on Hulu starting Thursday (March 20).

Sadie Sink levitating as Max Mayfield in “Stranger Things.” Her performance in the show’s fourth season introduced the music of Kate Bush to a younger generation.Netflix

It’s the first movie in eight years from the director, who grew up in Hillsdale and made his feature film debut with another musical movie, “Patti Cake$,” in 2017.

“O’Dessa,” a musical with sci-fi elements, is set in a post-apocalyptic landscape.

Sink, 22, stars as O’Dessa Galloway, a 19-year-old guitar hero in a story whose songbook runs from earthy folk music to glossy electro pop.

O’Dessa is heir to a guitar named Willa and a legacy passed down to her by her long-gone father Vergil (singer-songwriter Pokey LaFarge), a musical “rambler” in a family whose “seventh son,” according to prophecy, is destined to save the poisoned world.

The seventh son, it turns out, is a daughter — O’Dessa — who lives on a remote, toxic farm with her ailing mother Calliope (Bree Elrod). As she performs for a scarecrow audience, she knows she must leave home to chase her destiny. Besides her mother (who is still good for a duet), there is nothing there for the young singer.

O’Dessa is heir to a musical legacy of “ramblers” — and a prophecy. Nikola Predovic | Searchlight Pictures

When Willa is stolen shortly after she leaves home, O’Dessa is driven further toward her hero’s fate.

In the film, which premiered March 8 at the South by Southwest Film and TV Festival in Austin, Texas, Jasper’s hero travels across a barren, dusty, “Mad Max”-like landscape.

Her destination: the hellish frenzy known as Satylite City, where she puts her voice and her music to the ultimate test, with no less than the fate of the world on the line.

Jasper envisioned the movie as a classic mythic narrative — the hero’s journey.

“The seed of the idea was to tell some epic tale, some mythological musical odyssey through song, through a folk opera or a rock opera, using the song to do the emotional heavy lifting,” he says. “And the first thing that came was really the character of O’Dessa … this kind of runt in the wasteland. I just had this image in my head of a small, scrappy young woman with a pompadour and a guitar, kind of traversing this dangerous wasteland.”

A ‘strange cousin’ from a ‘strange world’: New Jersey

“O’Dessa,” Jasper’s second film, shares some themes with his first.

“Patti Cake$,” his 2017 feature directorial debut, received a glowing reception at its Sundance Film Festival premiere and a standing ovation at the Cannes Film Festival.

Australian actor Danielle Macdonald stars in the film as Patti Dombrowski, a young aspiring rapper from New Jersey. (Both “Patti Cake$ and ”O’Dessa” are Searchlight Pictures movies, but the rock opera is going direct to streaming without a theatrical run.)

In the film, Patti wants to leave Jersey and chase her hip-hop dream. Like O’Dessa, she knows she must make her voice heard. (And, like Sink’s “Stranger Things” character, she levitates in one fantasy sequence.)

Danielle Macdonald starred in Geremy Jasper’s first film, the New Jersey-set “Patti Cake$.” Searchlight Pictures

“I think Patty and O’Dessa are strange cousins, just in different dimensions,” Jasper says. “They’re both artists trying to find themselves out in some strange world. Patti’s is New Jersey and O’Dessa’s is Satylite City. Patti’s kind of stuck in her town and never really gets out and O’Dessa’s the opposite. She’s kind of out in the world and trying to find a new home, trying to find a better reality. But they are both stories about young women trying to find their voices for different reasons … they both have a fairytale logic to them.”

A fervent desire to hightail it out of Jersey is just one thing Jasper shared with Patti.

The director, who now lives in California, also had his own rap group when he was a student at Pascack Valley High School in Hillsdale.

In the 2000s, Jasper was the lead singer of indie band The Fever. Later, he wrote all of Patti’s rap songs for “Patti Cake$.”

READ MORE: Meet Geremy Jasper, N.J. director of ‘Patti Cake$,’ the movie that blew the roof off Sundance

Jasper has a rich history of pairing music with image.

Before he directed ”Patti Cake$,” he helmed commercials and music videos for artists including Florence + The Machine (“Dog Days are Over”) and Selena Gomez (“Love You Like a Love Song”).

So when it came time to assemble the songs for his rock opera, you know he was ready.

“My musical taste is really eclectic,” Jasper says. “And I’ve written, over the years, all different kinds of songs, and I’ve collected different kinds of songs. I’ve written really tender, gentle ballads. I’ve written country blues songs. I listen to a lot, and I’ve collected a lot of sounds and melodies, and so the film became an excuse for me to exorcise some of that stuff, to get it out. And each character had a sort of different genre that they represented. Each little world that we go into in ‘O’Dessa’ represents a different musical genre.”

Jasper, who found inspiration in classic concept albums like David Bowie’s “The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars” (1972) and Pink Floyd’s “The Wall” (1979), uses different styles of music to signal and show O’Dessa’s transformation along her journey.

“Everybody has a different vibe,” he says. “O’Dessa comes more from the country, so there is an acoustic (sound) … she’s from the soil, and you feel that — there’s more of a traditional sound to her. But as she goes on the journey and she meets other characters, their sounds and their genres kind of influence her and rub off on her. And by the end, she’s not playing folk music … she’s playing something a lot more modern … something grander, something that still has the same spirit, but is more reflective of her and the hero that she’s become.“

All 16 of the original songs in “O’Dessa,” 13 of which can be heard on the movie’s soundtrack, were written by Jasper and his longtime collaborator, composer Jason Binnick.

Early in the film, O’Dessa sets the stage for her path in “Ramblin’ Down the Road,” in which she embraces her musical heritage as a troubadour bound to take her songs on the road.

“On these six strings I’ll sing my destiny,” she sings in the tribute to her instrument.

From left: “O’Dessa” stars Bree Elrod and Regina Hall, director Geremy Jasper and stars Sadie Sink and Kelvin Harrison Jr. at the premiere of the movie in New York.Arturo Holmes | WireImage

By the time O’Dessa belts out her big wow-the-crowd number “The Song (Love is All),” she’s shed the country and folk for expansive, shimmering pop rock.

The first song Jasper heard Sink sing, in a video she recorded, was “Yer Tha One‚” the movie’s twangy, romantic ode to a sweetheart.

At that moment, he knew she was, indeed, the one.

“O’Dessa” is not the actor’s first musical leading role.

The Brenham, Texas native, who also has a New Jersey connection, made her Broadway debut in 2012.

She moved to Summit with her family as her career began to take off with a standby starring role in “Annie.”

Sink is returning to Broadway this very week in the play “John Proctor is the Villain‚” Kimberly Belflower’s modern, high school-set take on Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible.”

This year marks the end of the road for her breakout role in “Stranger Things,” which is heading into its fifth and final season eight years after she made her debut on the show in 2017.

And while “O’Dessa” is definitely one of Sink’s biggest movie roles to date, she’s made significant inroads in film, starring opposite Brendan Fraser in a combative, biting performance as his character’s daughter in Darren Aronofsky’s “The Whale” (2022).

Just days ago, she was announced as the latest cast member in the next “Spider-Man” movie (aka “Spider-Man 4″) starring Tom Holland.

An obsession 7 years in the making

In Satylite City, O’Dessa makes it pretty far from her old days singing to scarecrows.

But it’s also been quite the odyssey to make the movie happen — a seven-year odyssey.

“It took years knowing ‘OK, I wanna combine my love of Americana and American roots music and Appalachian folk music with my love of sci-fi dystopian films that I grew up with in the ‘80s, and then my love of psychedelia and prog rock and all the weird stuff from the ’70s,‘” Jasper says. “‘How do I combine all these things that I love into this sort of hero’s journey, monomyth, Joseph Campbell-style film?‘ And it took years and years to get the the ingredients right, but they had a certain pull on me, and the film just became like an obsession. There were many, many nights that I couldn’t sleep because I was so kind of in this fevered state from the prospect of making this film.”

Sink as O’Dessa with Kelvin Harrison Jr. as Euri. Nikola Predovic | Searchlight Pictures

Sink stars opposite Kelvin Harrison Jr. (“Chevalier,” Cyrano,” “Elvis,” “Waves”), who plays the charismatic Euri Dervish, a denizen of Satylite City who becomes O’Dessa’s love interest.

Together, they find hope in the soul-crushing city.

Emmy winner Murray Bartlett (“The White Lotus,” “The Last of Us,” “Ponyboi,” “Opus”) plays Plutonovich, the dastardly figure who controls the city and hosts a brutal TV show called “The One” where contestants must perform for their lives in a cutting sendup of “American Idol,” “The Voice” and “America’s Got Talent.”

And if you ever wanted to see Regina Hall go full evil villain, she clearly relishes her deliciously despicable turn as Neon Dion. (The character’s half-bowl cut hair is its own departure.)

Murray Bartlett as the all-powerful Plutonovich.Nikola Predovic | Searchlight Pictures

Dion, a crime boss, has Euri in her clutches. Because she claims him as her lover, he has to sneak around with O’Dessa at their peril so they won’t trigger alarm bells with the enforcer for Plutonovich.

Jasper took inspiration for the Russian-flavored name from Pluto, the Roman god of the dead. He based O’Dessa’s name on the singer Odetta, born Odetta Holmes, known for her folk music, blues songs and spirituals as well as her association with the civil rights movement and influence on artists like Joan Baez and Bob Dylan.

In using an “O” name, he also wanted to reference Orpheus, a musician who in Greek mythology, traveled to the underworld to find his dead wife, Eurydice — the inspiration for Euri’s name. The mythological theme extends to O’Dessa’s parents, Vergil (like the Roman poet) and Calliope, as well as the fearsome Dion for Dionysus — god of wine, partying and madness.

Regina Hall as the crime boss and enforcer Neon Dion. Nikola Predovic | Searchlight Pictures

From ’80s escapism to a ‘scary’ reality

Ancient mythology helped build the bones of “O’Dessa.”

But a time far more recent — the ’80s — colors the look and feel of the film.

The movie’s fuzzy opening will be familiar to anyone who ever popped in a VHS tape.

“The big influences from that time period were ‘The Road Warrior’ — ‘Mad Max 2′ (1981) — ‘Labyrinth’ (1986), ‘Legend’ (1985) by Ridley Scott, ‘Time Bandits’ (1981) by Terry Gilliam,” Jasper says.

Growing up, he was also enchanted by the vivid covers of movies on display at the local supermarket.

“There were a lot of low-budget dystopian action movies being made in Italy at the time, kind of weird knockoff movies,” the director says. “They were films that I never actually saw, but they had the covers there in ShopRite. Stuff that I ended up seeing later, like ‘(1990:) The Bronx Warriors’ (1982).”

Euri and O’Dessa’s love stands as a beacon of hope in a dystopian city.Nikola Predovic | Searchlight Pictures

Jasper says John Carpenter’s “Escape from New York” (1981) was another “big one” for him as a kid.

“All of those films are in the DNA of ‘O’Dessa’ for sure,” he says.

The flashy artifice and saturated neon lights of Satylite City channel a futuristic ’80s vibe that clashes with the homespun, earthen landscape of O’Dessa’s family farm.

Jasper filmed the movie in Croatia, where cinematographer Rina Yang (“The Fire Inside,” “Bohemian Rhapsody”) captured all of the wonder, awe and angst of the dizzying city built by production designer Scott Dougan (“The Deuce,” “Bridge of Spies”).

There are sci-fi flourishes in the musical, billed as happening “in another time, in another place,” but the story closely touches on real life in 2025.

Through Bartlett’s character, Plutonovich, the movie makes a commentary on the pressure to supply endless streams of “content” to feed the public.

Movies of the 1980s informed the look and feel of “O’Dessa.”Nikola Predovic | Searchlight Pictures

The “face job” — a face-twisting, brain-altering punishment Plutonovich doles out to unsuccessful contestants on his show — conjures the warping effects of plastic surgery popularized by celebrities and social media influencers.

From O’Dessa’s polluted farm to a huge pipeline and an ominous substance that looks like rainbow oil slicks, the state of the environment is another source of tension in the film.

Real-life parallels, like the dire effects of climate change, are more than a little daunting — “scarier than I expected,” Jasper says.

“Some of the themes have become so present now that it’s a little bit unbearable,” the director says with an uncomfortable laugh. “This was supposed to be kind of escapist. And then it becomes like ‘oh sh–, this was supposed to be surreal and it’s becoming more and more real.‘ And that makes me feel very queasy.”

“O’Dessa,” which is rated PG-13 and runs 1 hour and 46 minutes, will be streaming on Hulu starting Thursday, March 20.

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Amy Kuperinsky may be reached at [email protected] and followed at @AmyKup on Twitter/X, @amykup.bsky.social on Bluesky and @kupamy on Instagram and Threads.