How Este Haim reached out and touched Hollywood

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Este Haim is a rock ’n’ roll bassist, a highly visible New York Knicks fan and — as of this past New Year’s Eve — the happily married wife of a blockchain entrepreneur named Jonathan Levin.But what she is before anything else, she says, is a sister — one of three, along with her younger siblings Danielle and Alana, in the beloved Los Angeles rock band Haim.So when Este, 40, saw an early cut of “Voicemails for Isabelle,” a new Netflix movie that premieres Friday with a score by Haim and composer Amanda Yamate, “I was like, How am I gonna get through this?” the musician recalls.Written and directed by Leah McKendrick, “Voicemails” stars Zoey Deutch as a chef in San Francisco who’s just lost her sister to cancer; the film’s novel meet-cute (if that’s the term for it) arrives when Deutch’s character starts leaving heartrending messages for her late sister at the phone number now owned by a hunky real estate agent played by Nick Robinson.“I love my sisters so much that the idea that something could happen to them — it wrecks me,” Haim says.

“I don’t think I’d be able to recover.”Despite the movie’s bleak premise, “Voicemails” strikes a warm and witty tone that evokes rom-com classics by Nora Ephron and Nancy Meyers.“My mantra for the whole movie — for every one of my departments — was: Let’s make this better than it needs to be,” McKendrick says with a laugh.

(Indeed, “Voicemails” opens with an epic needle drop in Robyn’s “Dancing on My Own.”) Yamate, who previously teamed with Haim to compose the music for 2023’s “You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah,” says the two musicians thought of their score as “bringing out that delicate, fragile sister love” that underpins the film.Haim spoke about her work as a film composer and about the future of her band — the trio’s fourth LP, the Grammy-nominated �...