Song Sung Blue: Musical lightning!

Song Sung Blue (2025) • View trailer

Four stars (out of five). Rated PG-13, for dramatic intensity, brief profanity and fleeting drug use

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 1.4.26

If writer/director Craig Brewer’s poignant drama weren’t based on actual events, it would be a shameless tear-jerker.

 

Be advised: The fact that it is based on actual events, makes it even more of a tear-jerker.

 

Mike (Hugh Jackman, left), Dave (Fisher Stevens, center left) and Mark (Michael
Imperioli, center right) listen intently, as Tom (Jim Belushi) outlines their upcoming
touring schedule.

In the interests of full disclosure, I’ve been a life-long Neil Diamond fan since early high school, which makes me inclined to be both forgiving and potentially hyper-critical. But the latter never came into play, because both Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson are fabulous singers and performers. 

Brewer’s film, based on Greg Kohs’ 2008 documentary of the same title, deftly profiles small-time musicians Mike Sardina (Jackman) and Claire Stengl (Hudson): how they met, and the magic that occurred once they got together.

 

Brewer begins unexpectedly, with a tight-tight-tight close-up of Jackman’s face, as Mike gravely recounts some seminal moments in his life: a confession of sorts, which concludes as the camera pulls back, to reveal that he’s at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. It’s a special day — his 20-year “sobriety birthday” — and he celebrates it as he has each one before, by concluding with a solo guitar performance of “Song Sung Blue.”

 

Mike moonlights as a mechanic to support his true passion, as a veteran musician — nicknamed Lightning — on the Milwaukee gigging circuit, performing whatever is demanded at county fairs, small auditoriums and dive bars. After uncharacteristically refusing a gig — insisting that trying to impersonate Hawaiian pop singer Don Ho is too much of a stretch — he chances to catch Claire doing her Patsy Cline act at the Wisconsin State Fair.

 

They click (to put it mildly).

 

“I’m not a songwriter, I’m not a sex symbol,” he confesses. “I just want to entertain people.”

 

“I don’t want to be a hairdresser,” she replies, “I want to sing, I want to dance, I want a garden, I want a cat.”

 

The relationship happens quickly, both because they’re sympatico … and also because Jackman and Hudson radiate charm and charisma the way the rest of us breathe. Mike and Claire are totally cute together, with a goofy, giddy level of excitement like teenagers experiencing love for the first time.

 

Both have painful pasts. In addition to his hard-fought sobriety, Mike carries trauma from his service in Vietnam as a “tunnel rat,” and has a failed marriage behind him; Claire also is divorced. 

 

Mike gets occasional visits from his college-age daughter, Angelina (pop chanteuse King Princess); their relationship is prickly, at best. Claire has two kids — teenage Rachel (Ella Anderson) and adolescent Dana (Hudson Hensley) — who frequently drive her crazy. Both Mike and Claire also struggle financially.

 

Musically, though, they go together like peanut butter and jelly.

The Glass Castle: A shattering family dynamic

The Glass Castle (2017) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rated PG-13, and generously, for dramatic intensity, family dysfunction, children in peril, and brief profanity
By Derrick Bang

And I thought Detroit was hard to watch.

(It is. So’s this one.)

As Friedrich Nietzsche observed, That which does not kill us, makes us stronger.

Rex (Woody Harrelson, center), ever the ludicrous idealist, attempts to put a positive
spin on the dilapicated shack that his family is about to call hom; everybody else — from
left, Lori (Sadie Sink), Brian (Charlie Shotwell), Jeannette (Ella Anderson), Rose Mary
(Naomi Watts) and Maureen (Eden Grace Redfield) — is justifiably appalled.

Jeannette Walls must be pretty damn strong.

Walls’ riveting — and frequently heartbreaking — 2005 account of a childhood spent with nomadic and unstable parents remained a fixture on the New York Times Best Seller list for an astonishing 261 weeks. The book is a deeply personal memoir told with grace, perceptive intelligence and unexpected wit; it leaves readers not only with great respect for Walls — and her three siblings — as survivors, but also emphasizes the spiritual importance of closure and forgiveness.

Most readers undoubtedly finished the final pages with awe, thinking, You’re a better, nobler soul than I, Ms. Walls.

Her book has been transformed into an equally compelling film by up-and-coming director Destin Daniel Cretton, who with co-scripter Andrew Lanham has distilled the crucial essence and vitality of Walls’ book, while miraculously finding the heart of a saga that feels unrelentingly tragic. Granted, he had help: not only from his three primary stars, but also from an impressively well-selected collection of young actors.

Everybody turns in a masterful, thoroughly persuasive performance. Which, of course, makes the film that much harder to watch.

Cretton begins his film in 1989. Jeannette (Brie Larson) is polished, poised and refined: every inch a late twentysomething Manhattan journalist, regaling friends and professional acquaintances with often hilarious tales of her encounters while penning the “Intelligencer” column for New York magazine. She’s engaged to marry David (Max Greenfield), an ambitious financial advisor on the fast track to Big Apple aristocracy.

But we sense something. Jeannette is too elegant: less a human being and more a porcelain doll. Larson’s features are frozen, and she moves with a stiffness that suggests fragility, and the possibility that she might shatter at any moment.

A chance encounter during a late-night taxi ride home calls up memories, at which point Cretton establishes the format for his narrative: Jeannette’s saga will bounce back and forth, from present to past, until the two intersect.