Crazy Heart (2009)

Many a movie about musicians starts to feel like one of those old “Behind the Music” shows, a heavily-edited, moralized version of someone’s rags-to-riches-to-rags-and-maybe-back-again life. Crazy Heart has that narrative arc, but it doesn’t feel like a show. It doesn’t even feel like a documentary. It feels like one of those musicians’ home movies. Oh, it’s all fiction. There is no real country singer named Bad Blake. I know that. You know that. The movie doesn’t know that, and that—along with a deep performance by Jeff Bridges—is Crazy Heart’s strength.

Crazy Heart is one of those films that relies less on plot than on character, and the main character here is the aforementioned Bad Blake (Bridges). Bad (“My real name will be on my tombstone,” he says. “Until then, I’m Bad Blake.”) is an old school country singer. He had some big hits, once, years ago (he’s still regarded as a home-run songwriter, when he can be bothered to write), but lately he’s fallen on hard times. Bad tours the West, playing dive bars and bowling alleys, without even a permanent backup band. On gig nights, he hands kids he’s never met CDs and sheet music from the back of his truck: “Listen real good to this. I’ll show up in an hour.” Meanwhile, his own protégée, young Tommy Sweet (an understated Colin Farrell), packs arenas playing slick Nashville-produced covers of Blake’s songs. Bad Blake is on autopilot, and it’s not pretty. He drinks too much. He doesn’t care.

Turns out, though, one guy in one of his ‘pick-up bands’ isn’t a kid, but a seasoned, talented pianist. Blake likes him for that. Turns out the guy has a niece who’s a small-time music journalist. Turns out she wants to interview Bad Blake. Blake has nothing to lose, and time to kill. What the hell—he’ll meet the niece. And so into Bad’s motel room and into his life walks Jane Craddock (Maggie Gyllenhaal, effortlessly appealing). At first, Blake tries to put her off. But she knows more about country music—and him—than he suspected. She’s younger than him, by a lot, but they’ve both made mistakes and they’ve both lost. And so they connect on some level, the level on which many a classic country song operates. This could be the start, as the saying goes, of a beautiful…well, a beautiful something.

What that something is I will leave you, if you are so inclined, to discover. The movie plays itself out in ways that are sometimes expected and sometimes not, but which are always genuine. Crazy Heart takes Bad and Jane seriously, and neither romanticizes nor cheats them. We’ve seen this sort of hard luck, hard-drinking, love-of-a-good-woman story before, but rarely this richly presented. The movie has time for details. Bad is, well, bad. Not mean, but adrift. Alcoholic. Selfish. Cynical. But notice how, even drunk, he remembers the song he’d promised a fan. And notice how, when he calls Jane long distance, and her four-year-old son answers the phone, he has time for the kid, too. And notice how, to interview Bad after a show, Jane has to find a babysitter. And how the only rule she lays down about Bad’s drinking is “not in front of my son.” Too many movies are just about characters. This one feels like it’s actually about people.

It helps that the number of people the film focuses on is rather small. First, of course, is Bad Blake, and Bridges, with greasy hair and sunglasses from the Hank Williams Jr. collection, owns this role. Some performances jump out at you. Bridges’s turn here sneaks up on you. He is Bad Blake. Jeff Bridges is a busy guy. His is a familiar face. I forgot I was watching him. The role won Bridges a Best Actor Oscar, and justly so. He builds Bad Blake from the inside out, and wisely lets it show that the character, too, is an actor. The flashier turn as a guy named ‘Bad’ is by Blake himself, not Bridges. There are layers to this performance, all of them well-executed. Bridges also does his own singing, which adds authenticity. It’s often said that an actor “inhabits” a role; Jeff Bridges seems to have been living in Bad Blake for years. It pays off. Without a ringer in the Blake role, the film would fall apart. It doesn’t. Guess why not.

The other key player is Jane. Maggie Gyllenhaal does “likable” about as well as any actress working, but it’s to her and the script’s credit that Jane is more than a long-suffering pretty face. She is not a groupie, nor is she naive. Jane is interested in the guy, not the persona. Pay attention to the scene where she cries as Bad plays a new song, and why she cries when she does. Also notice how she reacts when Bad finally goes too far. There is no big shouting scene. After all, that only happens in the movies.

Filling in the edges are solid turns by Colin Farrell (also singing his own stuff) as the younger star who knows how lucky he has been in his timing—and his friends, and Robert Duvall as Blake’s old pal Wayne, the kind of guy who knows when not to serve Bad whiskey, and also when to take him fishing. Duvall himself gave an Oscar-winning performance as a hard-living country singer in Tender Mercies, and his presence here has a similar “seal of approval” feeling to Leonard Nimoy’s appearance in the Star Trek reboot.

This is a movie about music, among other things, and the music it features—written or chosen by T-Bone Burnett—is just right. The music attracted an Oscar as well, for “The Weary Kind,” the song that makes Jane cry. Blake’s material feels like it’s been around for a while, and sounds just as good played on one acoustic guitar as it does with Tommy’s full-strength band behind it. At some point in the film, I realized that, if Bad Blake was playing a bar near me, I’d probably go hear him. He’s not going to do that, of course, but it’s to the movie’s credit that I sort of hope he does.

“Character pieces” like this are not for everyone, but, then, neither is country music. For those interested, however, Crazy Heart offers both those things, both well-performed.