A human interest story in cinematic form, Song Sung Blue is more lukewarm than heartwarming despite its talented cast. Starring Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson as a married Neil Diamond nostalgia act, the film – written and directed by Craig Brewer of Hustle & Flow – is based on real events, but picks its moments in puzzling fashion. Alfred Hitchcock once said “drama is life with the dull bits cut out,” but Brewer seems to challenge that notion by doing the opposite, leaving the most intriguing bits of his story far off-screen.
Milwaukee musician Mike “Lightning” Sardina (Jackman), a recovering alcoholic formerly deployed to Vietnam, is middle-aged, divorced, and relegated to doing impressions of better artists on stage. His career stagnates until he meets and falls in love with Patsy Cline impersonator Claire Stingl (Hudson), an upbeat fellow divorcée with whom he soon concocts the Neil Diamond tribute band, Lightning & Thunder. The movie opens and closes with Mike, and follows the couple’s ups and downs through his eyes; however, Song Sung Blue can’t help but feel like it has the wrong protagonist.
When the story begins, many of Mike’s struggles are in his rearview, although he keeps his ongoing health problems close to the chest (no pun intended). Jackman’s performance is – despite his geographically unplaceable accent – incredibly charismatic and heartrending, as a concerned husband, father, and stepfather looking out for his family when things go south for Claire in ways better left unspoiled. However, there’s not much to him as a character beyond what he’s already been through. He’s occasionally cocky, but Claire, along with Mike’s friends and peers – played by a cavalcade of great character actors like Michael Imperioli, Fisher Stevens, and Jim Belushi – are immediately forgiving of his ego. There’s no real tension or drama to anything he does, beyond the tragedies that end up befalling his spouse. Were their genders flipped, he’d be a perfectly serviceable and typical supporting biopic wife.
On the other hand, Hudson’s conception of Claire as a bubbly artist and mother to a teen and middle schooler is far more magnetic. Song Sung Blue is at its most interesting when it’s a story about her expectations, whether or not they can be met, and what happens when life throws violent curve balls her way. Hudson tries to transform all of this into a tale of a woman knocked back down by life until she finds the strength to pick herself up again with her husband’s help. Unfortunately, what remains of this story is mere bullet-point highlights; we often need to be reintroduced to Claire after time has passed and she’s already come to realizations about herself and how to approach the world, including stints in psychiatric wards and physical rehab clinics. To reduce these struggles to mere interludes may as well be dramatic malpractice.
Worse yet, when Claire’s misfortunes do finally enter the fray, the film has spent so little time with her, and so little time on anything of interest, that the story’s turns feel hilariously sudden despite the anguish on display. Given Brewer’s stylistically and narratively noncommittal approach, when something finally happens, it feels like a melodramatic SNL sketch. There’s a flatness to the whole affair that’s only brought to life by the warm skin tones of Amy Vincent’s cinematography, which unfortunately doesn’t make up for the lack of energy during its musical performances.
The film is also unstuck in time in curious ways. Its perspective on Diamond’s music – and music in general – is practically nil, despite featuring several of his famous songs (like “Sweet Caroline”) as well as infrequent scenes of Mike hinting that the artist’s work holds personal meaning in his life. What that meaning is remains a mystery, as does the movie’s actual setting. The couple’s real romance lasted from 1987 until 2006, but Song Sung Blue has little sense of an actual time period. Given that neither character’s children age on screen, it could conceivably take place in either the ’80s or the mid-aughts. For a film about real people made of flesh and blood who age and hurt and fail, having no sense of time’s passing is especially strange.
