In The Thing Called Love, Samantha Mathis plays the main character, Miranda Presley. Mathis is the central focus in an ensemble of actors. Her Miranda is a New Yorker traveling to Nashville to write and sing country music. (Miranda's last name would seem to divine a successful career in country music, but as she tells other characters in the film, there is “no relation” to Elvis.) In the opening shots, Mathis nods away sleepily in a Greyhound bus that takes her from the big city to the American South. The film's opening montage is comprised of traveling shots of the New York City skyline—the city Miranda leaves—accompanied by country music, as Miranda is swiftly transported to The Bluebird Café in Nashville, where she will eke out a living as a waitress while writing her songs while also developing relationships with two country singers, played by Phoenix and Dermot Mulroney, who compete for her affections, and a friendship with another would-be singer, played by Sandra Bullock. The end of the narrative, as Miranda nearly gives up in her struggle to become a noted singer before returning to Nashville to try again, strikes a playfully ambiguous note. After Mathis gives a sterling performance of an original song called “God's a Woman,” she leaves The Bluebird Café alongside both of her male paramours, and the film is as uncertain about which man she will choose, or if she will choose, as it is about whether any of the young singers in the film will achieve further success as artists or musicians.

There is one sequence in the film I always remember, and that I remember remembering with pleasure throughout the years in which I have spent time with this film; in the years before films were very soon available after release via digital download, and in which there was no available internet to look again and again at a trailer or a scene selected for publicity, I had to wait several months to see anything from the film again after I first saw it in a cinema during the summer of 1993. It is a moment of performative joy—the joy of gesture and music. Miranda is attending a country linedance in Nashville.