Glen Hansard was not a movie star. The Irish musician, who died today in a motorcycle accident, fronted the Irish rock band The Frames, released records as a solo artist, and performed as part of the duo The Swell Season, with singer and musician Markéta Irglová. That act was formed during the gestation of the movie Once, where Hansard and Irglová played characters seemingly not unlike themselves: musicians falling in love. (They did become a real-life couple; though the romantic relationship only lasted a few years, they subsequently remained friends and collaborators, and The Swell Season put out a record just last year.) In the process, Hansard became integral to the production of one of the best musicals of the 2000s.

Once was not Hansard’s first film. He had a substantial supporting role in the now-seminal 1991 film The Commitments, about a fictional Irish rock band. But sudden fame from that movie seemed to spook him, and he didn’t do any more acting work for the rest of the decade. One of Hansard’s bandmate from The Frames, however, remained interested in film. John Carney played bass alongside Hansard for a few years before moving into filmmaking full-time later in the ’90s. He made several Irish indie movies before working on the idea for Once, about a busker who meets a fellow musician and shares a brief but intense creative (and personal) connection. Initially, Carney asked Hansard to write songs for the film and provide some input related to his own busking experience. Cillian Murphy was going to star, but when Murphy dropped out of the project, Hansard was convinced to step in, and proved a close collaborator.

The production took years to come together, but only 17 days to shoot on its tiny budget. It was shot in January 2006, played Sundance a year later, and was released throughout the world in spring and summer of 2007. At the time, movie musicals were undergoing a comeback at the U.S. box office: Moulin Rouge! kicked off the new decade with box office and Oscar success, which a film version of Chicago then surpassed in 2002 and into 2003. Film versions of Rent, The Producers, Dreamgirls, and Sweeney Todd would soon follow — not all hits, but certainly an indication that the high-profile big-studio musical was considered commercially viable again.

Once doesn’t really fit in with its contemporaneous Broadway adaptations (though the movie was later adapted into a Broadway show of its own); it has more in common with the more experimental strain of movie musicals that produced Dancer in the Dark. It also shares some DNA with another strain of musical that came to particular prominence in the mid-2000s: the musical biopic, with movies like Ray and Walk the Line. The musical act The Swell Season resulted from the film, rather than acting as inspiration for it, and Once is obviously fiction anyway — Hansard was not making his living as a busker when it was made — but it also attends to what some musical biopics overlook: the process of creation and collaboration.

In this 86-minute movie, Carney gives nearly seven minutes over to the scene where Hansard and Irglová first play the song “Falling Slowly” together in a music shop. That’s a decent chunk of runtime devoted to what is basically just two people preparing to play a song and then performing together with increasing confidence. The intimacy conveyed here, by Carney’s handheld camera and especially by the actor-singers who really are playing the song, is rarely seen in musicals or their biographies. It plays like an indie call-forward to Bradley Cooper’s Star Is Born remake from a decade later, without the self-consciousness.

Yet unlike many other non-integrated musicals — musical films where the characters don’t burst into song, but have in-story reasons for performances that more or less exist in the real world — Once has the urgency and sometimes even transporting energy of a “real” musical. The characters aren’t exactly bursting into song out of nowhere, but Hansard makes busking feel like the closest possible real-world equivalent (at least without getting into cringe-y flash-mob territory). In another scene, Irglová sings lyrics to one of Hansard’s tracks as she listens on headphones, walking alone at night. The audience hears the music and lyrics synced together, further blurring the lines between handmade movie musical and real life.

That unusual quality makes the performances from Hansard and Irglová crucial to the movie’s success; we need to believe them as people and as musical performers simultaneously. Hansard had far less experience as an actor than original choice Cillian Murphy — who would go on to win an Oscar for Oppenheimer — but his bona fides as a musician ultimately made him the better choice for this particular role.

And, as it turns out, Hansard wound up winning an Oscar, too. “Falling Slowly” received the Academy Award for Best Original Song, further raising Hansard’s profile as a musician. He never returned to acting in a major way; he had a bit part in the musical Cyrano, but mostly continued to make music and tour. Once takes place over the course of just a few days, with a bittersweet ending that keeps the young musicians’ love largely unstated and entirely unconsummated — unless you count the music.

Hansard was able to experience much greater success than his character, but his untimely death continues the reality-blurring nature of Once. Just as in the movie, real-life time with him seems too brief.  

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.