Review by A.A. Dowd: As Bad Blake, the drunk poet, ramblin’ man hero of “Crazy Heart,” Jeff Bridges sports a thick, bushy grey beard and a gravelly baritone stuck somewhere between grizzled and perpetually hungover. He looks and sounds a bit like Kris Kristofferson—so much so, really, that one wonders occasionally why that real country legend wasn’t dragged in to play this fictional dead ringer. But Bad’s got a twinkle in his eye, a hint of mad mischief swimming in a whiskey-haze, that’s pure Bridges. With characteristic hyperbole, Pauline Kael once proclaimed this old pro the most natural and least self-conscious actor Hollywood’s ever seen. Here, in one of those Role-of-a-Lifetime plum parts afforded our aging star royalty, Bridges leans hard on this affection. He does it well, though, sinking comfortably into the shopworn shoes of iconic-veteran cliché, investing a rather thinly-sketched archetype with the weight and presence of his own career trajectory.

For a baldly predictable redemption story, “Crazy Heart” has an agreeably ramshackle quality about it. Like its hard-drinking, low-living protagonist, it often seems in no particular hurry to get anywhere. But the road to recovery is a long one, and writer-director Scott Cooper, whose point-and-shoot staging befits his utterly conventional scripting, steers the narrative into some early potholes. Bad Blake is this year’s Randy the Ram: a washed-up, down-on-his-luck, ex-superstar now carving out a meager living on the margins of his once-lucrative field. In the opening scene, he shuffles into a bowling alley, where he’ll play his golden oldie Nashville gems to a dwindled crowd of faithfuls, competing constantly with the nearby cacophony of rolling balls and careening pins. Insult is ladled onto injury—though management won’t even allow him a bar tab, Bad gets too sloshed to play his whole set, spending half of it on his hands and knees out back, puking his guts out. As the saying goes, you gotta break ‘em down before you build ‘em up, and “Crazy Heart,” like “The Wrestler” before it, digs that knife in real deep.

The parade of humiliations can’t go on forever. And it’s the love of a good woman that lights a fire under Bad’s tired old ass, with Maggie Gyllenhaal (shrill, in a thankless part) occupying the fairer half of an improbable May-December romance. More complex is the relationship between Bad and his one-time protégé, a commercial country big shot named Tommy Sweet. (If you don’t know who plays this Tim McGraw stand-in, stay in the dark and wait for the big reveal. It’s at least good for a hearty laugh.) The difference, as implied by Gyllenhaal’s aspiring rock journalist, between Bad’s true grit and Tommy’s radio-pop, watered-down stab at it, could have been the compelling crux of the movie. But that would have required a much more specific dramatic arc, Bad’s rise and fall linked to drastic changes in the country music scene. Cooper, alas, strikes the major keys only. And Bridges could be playing any aging gladiator gone too long from any spotlight.

“Crazy Heart” is based on a novel by Thomas Cobb, and these unreal origins prove a double-edged sword. On the one hand, the film owes its rambling passages, those inspired moments of near-improvisational downtime, to the freedoms of fiction. Without a life model to strictly adhere to, Cooper never gets bogged down in the connect-the-dots storytelling of the standard biopic. On the other hand, Bad Blake’s hallowed history, born purely of a novelist’s imagination, lacks any precise sense of cultural/anecdotal detail. It’s an anonymous given—he’s a “legend” in the most general of terms, and the movie sketches his revered career in the haziest of hindsights, in hushed whispers conveniently devoid of solid details. (There’s lots of talk of the good ol’ days, when things was different, simpler.)

The songs, convincing throwback numbers by grassroots go-to-composer T. Bone Burnett, are pleasant enough, but no match for the real deal. If we’re going to trudge through the august years of an imaginary hero, shouldn’t his Greatest Hits be more memorable than the forgotten B-sides of, say, Neil Young or Willie Nelson? “Crazy Heart” finds its shape at the bottom of a bottle, sobering up into the same fight-with-addiction fable writers have been tacking onto autobiographical dramas for years now. For Bad Blake, a ghost of a different era, getting back on top is as easy as just sitting down and writing some damn music again. “The harder the life, the sweeter the song,” or so the tagline goes. There’s a better version of this story out there in the real world, complete with harder times and much sweeter songs. I think it stars Kris Kristofferson.

Last Word: Sometimes you eat the bar, sometimes the bar eats you. That bar could eat Bad Blake all the way to the bank—and, come this March, it could lead Bridges right up to that podium.

Review By:
A.A. Dowd

IN REVIEW ONLINE