Song Sung Blue

dir: Craig Brewer

2025

Look, I know how terrible this sounds on paper.

If you saw the poster, if you just heard the title, you might think it’s a cheesy biopic about Neil Diamond.

But wait, it’s not even that.

Song Sung Blue is a biopic about a cheesy Neil Diamond impersonator, and his eventual wife who sometimes impersonates Patsy Cline.

Huh. You could imagine people lining up around the block at their nearest multiplex for that one.

Hugh Jackman is great. Who doesn’t love Hugh Jackman?

He played the character of Wolverine / a guy who cuts people up with his metal claws in dozens of movies so often that, to overcompensate, he’s done a slew of other movies where he just sings. Singing is how he started off his career, playing the lead in The Boy from Oz, don’t you know, so it’s not something he only does when he’s drunk at karaoke like the rest of us.

So, yeah, his career is evenly split between cutting up people with his adamantium claws, and crooning to delightful crowds of basic bitches and general normies in flicks like Les Miserables, The Greatest Showman and Happy Feet, and then this flick here.

You might like Hugh Jackman, like I do, and you might like his singing, to which I am studiously indifferent. A lot of people loved him in Greatest Showman, like, a lot of people; I had friends, relatives and complete strangers telling me how much they loved that film.

And I’m still like: Okay. This flick isn’t necessarily going to make you a believer, but he plays it so, so well.

What I’m talking about, though, is the character that he’s playing, who was a real person, who was loved, who had his demons and still overcame them, who lived a life not of quiet desperation like the majority of us, but of out and loud determination to be a version of a star, who still yearned for the applause and the adulation, knowing full well that no-one would ever see him as anything more than an impersonator.

And his beloved Claire (Kate Hudson, who is so great in this). She, too is, like us, a total fucking nobody living a barely working class existence in suburban Milwaukee, who loves to sing too. She has no delusions of grandeur or greatness, and she is less a has been than a never was. But when she sings Patsy’s songs, she sings with her whole heart, and when she sings with Mike together on stage they are glorious, incandescent and fucking untouchable.

Even if what they’re singing is Neil Diamond songs.

It seems almost defensive and apologetic to say “you don’t have to like Neil Diamond’s music in order to enjoy this movie!!!” It’s openly contradictory, I admit, because the point of such a flick is perhaps showing why a certain set of music / a particular musician is great because this is how it allowed these artists to connect with this vast quantity of people, just like us shmucks in the audience.

Thing is, though, I don’t like Neil Diamond’s music at all. At All.

I didn’t grow up with the albums in my house, didn’t have a cassette or some goddamn 8-track in the family station wagon / kombi van, so I have no childhood affection for any of this nonsense.

But I thoroughly enjoyed this flick about not Neil Diamond.

Those songs are not beloved by me, but I know them. If I have all the cadences, beats, uplifts and melodies inserted into my DNA against my will, it’s involuntary, but it’s still there. I know them the way I know nursery rhymes, jingles from ancient ads, the theme songs from sitcoms. Thus I end up being like Mike, who’s sick of hearing and playing Sweet Caroline, having to accept that the people want, need to hear it, so don’t be a fucking snob about it, okay, and just enjoy delivering what they want to hear?

My own musical snobbery is something I’ve tried to fight against and change about myself, in order to better appreciate the rich tapestry of human experience and the fact that other people are entitled to their opinions about music (however wrong they may be, individually or collectively), but I can’t and shouldn’t argue against the deep seated and almost completely involuntary way in which people connect to each other through music.

And I guess that’s what the flick is about and gets across very well, perhaps exceeding the biopic melodrama of what happened in these people’s lives over the course of several years. I mean don’t get me wrong, a lot of that is somewhat fascinating, but we’re talking about very low stakes stuff here. This isn’t about whether Johnny Cash is going to ever succeed and prove his (first) wife wrong, or whether a young Bob Dylan is going to defy his elders and play electric at the folk festival in 1965 or whether Jimmy Rabbit is going to win that rap battle and finally get out of the poorest part of Detroit. These people are playing at state fairs. At one point Mike has a residency at a Thai restaurant. Claire is a hairdresser. Mike is a mechanic.

One character, a delightful Buddy Holly impersonator played by Michael Imperioli, who isn’t given enough to do, state’s that he’s a guy in his fifties imitating a guy who died in his 20s.

Mike’s manager is also his dentist (Fisher Stevens). When they need to impress someone, it’s a guy who books impersonators for cruises who usually drives the courtesy bus for a casino’s oldest patrons (Jim Belushi, trying to use up all the “golly gees” and “darn tootins!” simpleton figures of speech left over from the Fargo and Happy Days screenplays that apparently represent how people in Wisconsin actually speak).

That accent is key. Kate Hudson gets that accent down pat. She sounds like a middle-aged middle-class woman from the Midwest, and she’s a champ on the keyboards and on backup vocals.

She has a daughter and son from a previous marriage, and Mike has a daughter as well (played by King Princess!) The young boy is adoring, the daughter less so, though the daughters bond over their mutual embarrassment over their parents. They would not pass any Bechdel test, because even when they’re the only two people onscreen and in earshot, they’re always describing some aspect of Mike’s personality / history / sources of disappointment.

His struggles with addiction play a strong part in the story, as the scenes at AA meetings would generally be considered a cliché, but they come across as a vital part of Mike’s life, even though he’s been clean for 20 years.

Even then he feels like he’s hanging on by his fingernails.

I don’t want to spoil what little there is to spoil in this flick, but a lot of things happen to this family, and they happen in the film in a way where you almost can’t believe they actually happened (and happened, again), but they did. You feel like saying “oh my gods you poor bastards”, but that’s life, unfair shit happens all the time even to good people, and these are some of the goodest, yet that’s no shield unfortunately.

Yet, like us, at least those of us who survive, they stumble along, try again, fail, keep trying, and manage their small victories, and that’s enough, sometimes, isn’t it. To have felt joy onstage, and brought joy to others, whether you were supporting Pearl Jam or whether you’re playing to everyone that couldn’t afford to get into your home town’s Neil Diamond concert, that’s an achievement and a half.

I maybe don’t love Jackman’s singing, but I can’t fault his acting, in this. He plays the character with absolute conviction like every performance is life and death for him and he talks and acts with Kate Hudson like she’s more important to him than the air that he breathes or all the sequins on his spangly suits.

She, well, she’s amazing. She’s somehow luminous in this, and smiles like she’s overflowing with adoration in the simplest of scenes. I don’t know how she does it, but she does. It’s a keenly charismatic performance even though the character she’s playing is not. How does that make sense?

Craig Brewer has made two really solid films that I’m a big fan of, being Hustle and Flow and Black Snake Moan, and some other flicks, and this is a purely pulpy crowdpleaser, but I enjoyed the heck out of it. This almost feels like a parody of these people and this time and place, but I guess there’s an unembarrassed passion there embraces the squareness of many of these people and many of the things they do and say. It’s still relatable, easy to appreciate, and very much enjoyed at least by myself.

For my partner, who grew up with a double album Neil Diamond Greatest Hits compilation as one of the only albums in the house, well, you can imagine that this flick went down like catnip. I wouldn’t say she was the target audience necessarily, but there was not a dry eye in the house.

Song Sung Blue. Everybody knows at least one.

8 times Lightning and Thunder, very very wonderful out of 10

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“I'm not a songwriter. I'm not a sex symbol but, I am an entertainer.” - Song Sung Blue