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.

Wonder Wheel: Far from wonderful

Wonder Wheel (2017) • View trailer 
Three stars. Rated PG-13, for dramatic intensity and sexuality
By Derrick Bang

Toward the conclusion of Woody Allen’s newest dive into the pool of mid-century nostalgia, Kate Winslet’s Ginny — having descended into full-blown Norma Desmond madness — responds to an accusation by petulantly whining, “Oh, God; spare me the bad drama.”

My feelings precisely.

As the summer progresses, Mickey (Justin Timberlake) begins to realize that Ginny
(Kate Winslet) is placing far too much emotional weight on their clandestine affair.

Wonder Wheel is Allen’s homage to shrill, over-the-top melodrama: a contrived piffle that seeks to outdo the likes of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Sunset Boulevard, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane and their ilk. On top of which, the story is told by a character who — having informed us that he’s a budding poet and playwright given to florid exaggeration — clearly is an unreliable narrator.

Even allowing for all that, Allen’s film wallows in a swamp of soggy excess that surpasses the worst afternoon television soaps.

Which is a shame, because there’s much to recommend Wonder Wheel, starting with Vittorio Storaro’s gorgeous cinematography and Santa Loquasto’s impeccable period production design, which deliver a level of visual opulence rarely seen since Douglas Sirk’s lavish 1950s melodramas (Magnificent Obsession, Imitation of Life and others).

Even though all these characters recognize that their Coney Island home is past its prime, things still look terrific, in a fading-glory sort of way. The film takes its title from the massive Ferris wheel always standing vigil in the background, like a silent Greek chorus.

Ginny, pushing 40 and prone to migraines, works a dead-end job as a waitress in the Boardwalk clam shack. She’s married to Humpty (Jim Belushi), a recovering alcoholic who manages the merry-go-round in the amusement arcade. They live in a ramshackle apartment directly above the shooting gallery, the incessant pop-pop-pops frequently aggravating her debilitating headaches.

They bicker, snipe, squabble and quarrel in the manner of Ralph and Alice Kramden in The Honeymooners — also very 1950s — but with very little mitigating affection. It’s the second marriage for both, and we sense they’ve remained together mostly due to weary resignation.

They do a poor job of managing her bratty adolescent son, Richie (Jack Gore), a bad-seed monster and budding pyromaniac who loves setting fires below the wooden boardwalk. Everything concerning this little twerp seems to have migrated in from an entirely different film; his presence adds nothing to the core narrative, and his dangerous “hobby” is just sorta cast adrift during the third act ... rather sloppy, even for Allen.