Song Sung Blue (2025)

*/****
starring Hugh Jackman, Kate Hudson, Fisher Stevens, Jim Belushi
based on the documentary Song Sung Blue by Greg Kohs
written and directed by Craig Brewer

by Walter Chaw I wonder sometimes about movies like Craig Brewer’s Song Sung Blue, the “live-action” version, if you will, of a documentary about a popular pair of Wisconsin wedding singers and the surprisingly “VH1 Behind the Music”-friendly arc of their career. What I wonder is: Who wants this? Is there still pleasure in patronizing yokel-sploitation? Still meat left to worry on this feature-length Marty and Bobbi Mohan-Culp bone? It’s the Golden Corral of movies: emotionally un-taxing and mentally affordable, a determinedly middlebrow bellwether for class-coded nostalgia that reassures no matter how bad things are going for you, they’re going worse for some other good, hard-working, God-fearing folks out there. It’s not that one’s taking pleasure in the suffering of Thunder (Kate Hudson) and Lightning (Hugh Jackman), see, it’s that one’s taking pleasure in the fact that their suffering is not only more humiliating, protracted, and public than our own, but also inspiring. Always that.

Lighting is Mike Sardina, a woebegone Neil Diamond impersonator with a dream of starting a Neil Diamond tribute band that would open all of their gigs with a rousing rendition of Diamond’s beloved “Soolaimon,” from his sixth studio album, Tap Root Manuscript. If you’re keeping score, that record is Diamond’s Graceland, essentially: a semi-experimental world-music album buoyed to success by a couple of tracks. You say that opening Neil Diamond tribute gigs with it would be like opening Journey tribute gigs with “Stone in Love”? That’s because you’re a Philistine, bub. Kidding. Personally, I think if Neil Diamond had broken big in the 1950s, he wouldn’t generally be regarded as the butt of AM Gold jokes, but we’re here to talk about Lighting. Lighting has a dream, and one night he meets a Patsy Cline impersonator, Claire (Hudson), whom he dubs “Thunder,” because without it, there ain’t no Lightning. Following a montage of their whirlwind courtship inspired by their insipid meet-cute, new duo Lightning & Thunder fill their dance card with various gigs at restaurants and rest homes until, one fateful night, Eddie Vedder (John Beckwith) invites them to open for his band. The name of that band? Pearl Jam. Finally, Thunder’s earned some cred with his eye-rolly kids, Rachel (Ella Anderson) and Dayna (Hudson Hensley). Lightning has a kid, too, Angelina (King Princess), who notes early on that her bio dad is, like Mike, an addict in recovery, and that maybe Mike and Claire have substituted one addiction for another. I think she means music, or perhaps gigging, or even each other. It doesn’t matter. I don’t care.

Anyway, at the peak of their success, Thunder gets mowed down on her front lawn by a random driver and loses the lower part of her left leg. Then she…gets hooked on painkillers? Starts drinking? Becomes super-depressed? Kind of all of the above, leading to a moment where she’s led sadly into rehab, an occasion Brewer marks with a cut to the cover of Neil Diamond’s Christmas album in all its cheesy, feathered-hair, sparkling-imp’s-eye glory. It’s a choice as hilarious as it is inexplicable and should be taught in editing classes as either a subtle indication of deep self-loathing for this project or evidence that sometimes, when you spend too long trying to shape something that isn’t working, you do shit like this and lack the distance to see how ridiculous it is. Later, Thunder will tell Lightning that her new prosthetic isn’t for her leg, it’s for her mind. Then she’ll start singing again, culminating in a Big Night climax promising an appearance from the man himself, Neil Leslie Diamond, to finally bring things full circle, “you are the master, I am the learner”-style, for Lightning, but Lightning’s bad ticker… You know, Song Sung Blue really misses a trick by not having The Jewish Elvis arrive just in time to perform CPR on Lightning with those God-touched lips of his.

So is it good? No, it is not. Is it good for what it is? I mean, on a scale of is a bearded lizard excellent at being a bearded lizard, sure, Song Sung Blue is a perfect bit of awards-season flotsam headed for the Hallmark Channel for the half-interested consumption of an audience needing a palate cleanser between Jennifer Love Hewitt movies. It sidesteps disability issues, addiction issues–really anything approaching complexity on any issue that might make an audience mildly uncomfortable. And by sidestepping, I mean that while the film broaches heavy topics, it does so without paying them the respect they deserve. It’s not a movie about growth, but a car crash you slow down to gawp at so you can feel lucky and grateful. Midstream, out of nowhere, Rachel announces that she’s pregnant, promptly has the baby, gives the infant away to an anonymous couple we see only from behind, and then is physically and emotionally tip-top for the rest of the film. Snickersnack. No big deal. This isn’t a movie about people–it’s an algorithm, a calculation, a blueprint for a frictionless suppository. Come for Hugh Jackman in sideburns and spangles singing Neil Diamond songs, stay for Kate Hudson sliding in and out of a Fargo accent while being downright ebullient, soap-opera down, then gosh darn ebullient again. Cracklin’ Rosie! Clear space on that mantel, Kate: sounds like an Oscar to me.