Now that movie-theater crowds barely exist, how do we know what it means to make a crowdpleaser? Even if we no longer have the usual metrics, Craig Brewer’s delightfully unapologetic melodrama Song Sung Blue is a crowdpleaser in the best way. In this based-on-real-life story, Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson play a duo of Milwaukee performers, Mike and Claire Sardina, who become a surprise success with their Neil Diamond tribute act. It’s the 1990s, and everything is going great—the Sardinas, who perform under the name Lightning & Thunder, even get to open for Pearl Jam. Then a freak accident changes everything. You’ve seen this sort of triumph-over-adversity story hundreds of times before, but there are reasons we keep coming back to them—and there are still people who know how to make them without laying on the schmaltz. Brewer—who broke through with his 2005 feature, Hustle & Flow, and has since been working steadily on projects big and small—has the touch. Even if you occasionally find yourself rolling your eyes—a whole movie about a midwestern Neil Diamond act? Really?—he knows how to reel you back to what matters, in the movies and in life.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]Mike, a recovering alcoholic trying to make it in the music business—he performs under the name Lightning—is at a low point when he and Claire meet. He longs to sing original, or at least just decent, material, but he keeps being asked to impersonate corny performers like Don Ho. Then he meets Claire, a performer who’s working the tribute circuit: looking sassy in a western getup and curly brunette wig, she’s transformed herself into a wholly believable Patsy Cline, with the voice to match. The two become an item, and as they noodle around with some musical ideas, it’s she who ignites a new ambition in Mike. He adores the music of Neil Diamond and sings it beautifully. “You don’t want to be a Neil Diamond impersonator, you want to be a Neil Diamond interpreter,” she tells him, and the difference clicks. He devises a new act, with Claire on keyboards and singing backup, the Thunder to his Lightning. They meld families: Claire has two kids, smart, grounded teenager Rachel (Ella Anderson) and her shyer younger brother Dana (Hudson Hensley); Mike has a daughter, Angelina (King Princess), a steady, deadpan presence who hits it off with Rachel immediately. Mike and Claire marry. Claire’s wedding outfit includes a western-style hat swathed in tulle; she’s radiant, a country-music dream come to life. “I want to sing, I want to dance, I want a house, I want a garden, I want a cat!” she has told Mike, in a rush of words that gets to the heart of what makes performers tick, the idea of wanting to create a circuit between the outside world and the one within.
For a while, the major drama of Song Sung Blue revolves around Mike’s wanting to open the duo’s show with the low-key but intense Diamond number “Soolaimon,” while everyone around him insists the audience only wants to hear “Sweet Caroline.” Then Claire suffers an accident that will demand months of recovery and rehab; she sinks into a morass of anger and depression. How she, Mike, and her family climb back is the major dramatic pivot in Song Sung Blue, and Brewer—who also wrote the script, using Greg Kohs’ 2008 documentary of the same name as a framework—tells the story of their rise, fall, and return in a way that’s fleet and satisfying.
You could argue that Song Sung Blue hits every beat predictably. But isn’t that what you want sometimes? To see regular people get through tough times, and not by being effervescently cheerful and brave every minute? And, as always, the major strength of a movie like Song Sung Blue lies within its performers. Jackman is great at playing a big-personality guy, the sort of born entertainer who needs to make his mark on the world; for the act, he wants his luxe hair blowing just so, which means he’s got to have a fan going no matter how tiny the stage is. But he’s a charmer with a soul. A sequence in which he videotapes a message for his 21st sober birthday—his performance schedule means he’s going to miss his AA meeting that day—captures his crazy, generous spirit. It’s young Dana manning the camera, which seems to have drawn this happy but somewhat withdrawn kid out of his shell. The taped mini-performance will become the movie’s coda, a capper that suits this bittersweet feel-good movie. A bittersweet feel-good movie is perhaps the best kind.
But Hudson is the true heartbeat of Song Sung Blue. She may have made her name in easygoing romantic comedies like How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, but like her mother, Goldie Hawn, there’s much more to her than breezy sunlight. She’s superb as the rock-girlfriend Penny Lane in Almost Famous, rescuing the word groupie from its unjustly derisive context. And in Iain Softley’s marvelous ghost story Skeleton Key, she plays a dedicated hospice worker drawn to a spooky New Orleans mansion and its secrets, rounding each of the movie’s jagged plot turns with ease.
Here, as Claire, she’s a vision in mom jeans. Hudson’s face is rounder, a little softer—it’s older, an adjective we’re never allowed to use, even when it’s the best way to describe the way a performer, in character or otherwsie, is leaning in to the way age changes us. Brewer stages a gorgeous dream sequence in Song Sung Blue, a vision unapologetically borrowed from David Lynch: In this dream, Claire, having emerged from her dark, cloistered bedroom, a place she hasn’t been able to leave for months in real life, takes the stage in nightclub backed with a shimmery blue tinsel curtain. She’s wearing a sparkly, dream-colored evening dress, half pink, half cream; the song she’s singing is Patsy Cline’s “Sweet Dreams,” and just as Patsy’s does, her voice takes a small dip on the second word of the song, which is also the second word in its title. In one dazzling sequence, Brewer and Hudson capture what it means to come back from suffering to the greater world. Sometimes a bent note is the perfect note, the one we can sing in our dreams. The trick is to bring it out of the dark and into the light.
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