Brokedown country singer tries to crawl out of the bottle and into the arms of a good woman. Supporting figures: cute kid and younger, handsomer rival singer.
“Crazy Heart” — “Tender Mercies” minus the Christianity, “The Wrestler” on bourbon instead of steroids — can’t possibly deserve your close attention. Yet it does, with distilled honky-tonk poetry and generous good humor. It’s one of the year’s best, most deeply felt films.
The first feature from director Scott Cooper, who also wrote the script based on a novel by Thomas Cobb, is a showcase for Jeff Bridges, who provides the year’s signature performance by a lead actor.
Bridges fully inhabits singer Bad Blake, from his wrecked liver to his tornado hair. His breath is combustible, his hygiene lamentable, his future brief. The ’78 Suburban he drives around is livelier than he is. “I used to be somebody,” he sings in a desperation gig at a bowling alley. “But now I am somebody else.”
The departed somebody was a hit songwriter now forgotten by the public if not by such fans as a former student and current top star, Tommy Sweet (Colin Farrell, who must have been tempted to dial up the yee-hawing but doesn’t). The somebody else has roughly as many ex-wives as fans, and more empty bottles than either. Also there’s a grown son, somewhere. Bad doesn’t know him, and never will.
Jean (Maggie Gyllenhaal) is a journalist with a small son of her own. She won’t let him be raised by another whiskey slave, but even so she finds herself leaning in to get a closer look at what’s flickering inside Bad — dying talent, maybe, unless it’s something else. She wants to know where all his songs come from (“Life, unfortunately,” says Bad, with woeful authority). He wants to talk about how she makes the room around her feel ashamed of itself.
Gyllenhaal, though she is essentially the romantic version of a straight man, eases comfortably into the role instead of showing us how hard she’s working at it, with a sparkle in her eyes that is all the movie needs to keep Bad trying to be good. Uncertainly, she even allows the geezer to baby-sit her child for a day. What might the planned activities be? “Man stuff!” he says, and the boy agrees. “Man stuff!”
Such found moments — so elegant and mature is the screenplay that it usually doesn’t seem to have been written at all — make for genuine laughs, just as the bleak interludes involve recognizable, simple, ruinous mistakes (in the car, at the mall). Directing a picture like this one requires precision and dedication. The game is finished if we ever get the sense that our chain is being yanked, that we’re being sold a story instead of told one. But thanks to evocative settings, compassionate acting (including a brief but warm, funny appearance by Robert Duvall) and the high-caliber country songs written for the film, “Crazy Heart” is humbly radiant, a small thing gracefully done.
kyle.smith@nypost.com