Flasz On Film

Synopsis: A Don Ho impersonator who refuses to perform as anyone but himself reinvents his career and his life when he partners with a Patsy Cline tribute singer to form a Neil Diamond–inspired duo. As their fresh act “Lightning & Thunder” gains momentum, the two find love and kinship in one another, in spite of life’s drama getting in the way.

A movie like Song Sung Blue is simply expected to perform a specific function and deliver an emotionally-manipulative and heartfelt feel-good experience, while also sneaking past the barrage of prestige heavy-hitters littering the box office at this time in the year. And the vast majority of such movies fail to connect on anything deeper than the superficial appreciation of a competently assembled narrative driven by at least one commendable performance. This one, however, hits different.

Some filmmakers, like Cameron Crowe, John Carney, Alexander Payne and Mike Mills, just have a knack for finding the right balance between tear-jerking manipulation and fundamental authenticity and make films where the frequently deployed, blatantly swelling violins do not feel cheap and exploitative, but earned. Craig Brewer who co-wrote and directed Song Sung Blue, has now earned his place among those directors, especially when he works at the interface between humanist drama and musical expression; something he has done before in Hustle & Flow and Dolemite Is My Name.

Much like Almost Famous and Once, this movie can and will alienate initially with its barefaced earnestness pouring from the screen. Kids would probably call the material in which Song Sung Blue is sculpting “cringe.” Seeing a long-haired Hugh Jackman dressed in denim and playing his guitar in front of his AA group right at the beginning of the film is definitely a choice that sets the movie on a potentially perilous path. We simply don’t know where the filmmaker is going to take this story—which is mostly based on a true story and inspired by a documentary directed by Greg Kohs—and we must place a lot of trust in what’s coming, perhaps against our better judgment. After all, most movies that look and smell like Song Sung Blue eventually, and usually rather quickly, spiral towards predictable schmaltz and emotional exploitation instead of ascending towards rewarding catharsis in dramatic crescendo.

But then, just like Almost Famous which breaks into an Elton John song and dismantles the fourth wall for a brief second, Brewer’s movie chips away at your resistance to being affected by a potentially fraudulent piece of Oscar bait. This is something that’s almost ineffable and difficult to describe but the movie… just works. The minute you see Hugh Jackman interact with Kate Hudson’s character and see how these very normal-looking people with very real problems you might recognize and identify with yourself—strings of failed relationships, single parenting, past traumas, navigating life’s mundane difficulties—just hit it off. They gather in a living room, Jackman gets his guitar, Hudson sits behind the keyboard and they just rock out a Neil Diamond number. And you can’t help but smile along with them.
And then… you catch yourself briefly in the moment, correct your posture and promise that you won’t let your guard down again because this movie is just full of cheesy moments that look like bait for boomer viewers and you’re too smart to fall for it… and you fail once more in less than five minutes when they put a band together, jam in the garage and a mean-looking lady from across the street is seen dancing along to their music.

Which is where I understood that it was after all safe to dismantle my cynical defences and just let the movie toy with my emotions, force out tears of both sorrow and joy and just enjoy Song Sung Blue for what it was—a bittersweet movie about normal people who find one another, reignite an artistic fire in their bellies and chase their dreams while also battling very real obstacles.

Somehow, this movie found its way into my heart. This weird combination of a putting-on-a-show movie in the tradition of The Blues Brothers, oddities plucked out of Harmony Korine’s Mr. Lonely and aptly “normalized” for general audiences, that Crow-meets-Carney earnestness pouring out of musical performances and the completely earned dips into heavy drama we saw a few years ago in Bradley Cooper’s take on A Star Is Born is exactly what was needed to make Song Sung Blue such a potent experience. Anchored around two well-pitched performances from Jackman and Hudson, who are additionally supported by Fisher Stevens, Jim Belushi and Michael Imperioli, this movie escapes the orbit of the documentary it is based on and refuses to be seen as a tribute act to it. Just like the Lightning & Thunder act, which used Neil Diamond’s songs to create fantastic experiences for audiences who came to see them perform and elevated the musical material with their own singular personalities, Song Sung Blue does the same to this inspired-by-a-true-story pile of potential narrative clichés ready to be combined into a something schmaltzy and emotionally oppressive.

Between musicality, artistic commitment and fundamental narrative honesty lies the secret recipe for a movie like Song Sung Blue to succeed. This movie communicates upfront that it is going to tug at your emotions and maybe bend the truth of what really happened to the people who inspired the story to increase the stakes and conveniently bring things together exactly when it matters, but it is simply impossible to evade its charm. I wept. Everyone wept. And it felt right.

Not everyone likes Neil Diamond. But everyone will sing along to “Sweet Caroline.” Song Sung Blue is a movie equivalent of this phenomenon.