From a rocking chair on a front porch somewhere in the New American West comes the story of
Crazy Heart, a movie as warm and welcoming as the country music that rambles through it. The rocking chair might rock a little too gently for some, but it’s a nice time all the same.
Jeff Bridges is the whiskey-swigging guitar-toting country music has-been Bad Blake. He lives in Houston but spends most of his time on the road, roaming America’s south like a tumbleweed – Colorado, New Mexico, Texas, all looking postcard perfect here – in his ’78 Chevy Suburban pick-up truck. His manager (James Keane) gets him gigs at bowling alleys and beer joints, where Bad plays his old hits with session musos probably getting paid more than him, and occasionally gets so drunk he has to retreat backstage to throw up. “I used to be somebody, but now I’m somebody else,” he sings, and we believe him.
Still, it doesn’t seem like that bad a life. Bad is a decent guy, he has his groupies and his genuine fans, and his protégé Tommy Sweet (Colin Farrell in a ponytail) defies the conventions of this sort of movie by not having forgotten him. Then there’s Jean Craddock (Maggie Gyllenhaal), the Santa Fe newspaper journalist writing a story on Bad, whose interest in him quickly goes beyond the merely professional. Jean and Bad fall for each other despite the danger signs: Bad is a country music cowboy with an over-fondness for the bottle and a sordid past, and Jean is a single mother who needs stability for her young son.
Crazy Heart was written for the screen and directed by first-timer Scott Cooper, but it’s Bridges who does the best work here – no surprise he picked up a Golden Globe for the performance and is a forerunner for the Academy Award. He’s instantly recognisable and likeable as the washed-up old soul with a little less swagger in his stride these days. No stranger to a tune himself – he released a respectable record himself, Be Here Soon, some years ago – Bridges also has the perfect, world-weary voice of a bona fide country star who’s crashed a few trucks and fathered a few illegitimate children in his time (hint: there is a plot point in this sentence).
The music was composed by country music stalwarts Stephen Bruton and T Bone Burnett (the latter of whom worked on the soundtracks for
Walk The Line and
O Brother, Where Art Thou?), and most will be glad to know that a deep appreciation of fingerpickin’, snare brushin’ and guitar slidin’ won’t be necessary to get through it. The songs are actually quite charming, and ‘Fallin’ & Flyin’’ is absolutely convincing as Bad Blake’s biggest hit – with the kind of bumper sticker slogan chorus that lingers long after you’ve seen the movie. Besides which, the songs are an un-corny way to let us inside Bad’s head – song lyrics as soliloquies – and Bridges’s performance is all the more remarkable for how it shines through in each new number.
Comparisons often stink like a fart in a car, but there’s no mistaking the traces of
The Wrestler in
Crazy Heart. The films follow a similar trajectory plot-wise and they’re both about the fading light of a star that once burned bright. But while
The Wrestler was a spectacular, gritty tragic opera, a requiem of sorts,
Crazy Heart comes off as a little… pleasant. And if that word comes off like an anti-climax, it should give you a good idea of what Cooper frequently does with
Crazy Heart: you get the feeling that something big is about to go down – but it is swiftly resolved, just as you’re bracing yourself for the blows. We barrack for Bad Blake, but it mostly seems like misspent energy, because heck, he does all right, all in all. It’s a nice enough song. There could just have been a couple more minor chords in it.
Crazy Heart opens in Australian cinemas on Thursday, February 18.
You can view the Crazy Heart movie trailer here on TheVine.