It’s easy to be cynical about a heartwarming musical biopic like “Song Sung Blue.” Heck, if anything that cynicism is reasonable — these movies are dime a dozen, overstocked, and going on sale. The film stars two gorgeous Hollywood celebrities as everyday, salt of the earth, blue collar people who come this close to stardom and stall out, through no fault of their own. They’ll love, they’ll laugh, they’ll cry, they’ll suffer. They’ll start from nothing and eventually play a big venue. You’ve already seen this movie. It just didn’t have Neil Diamond songs before.
But here’s the thing: Cynicism is also a dime a dozen, and if you check, I think you’ll find it’s hitting its expiration date. Life is too damn hard to get so damn mad about a sweet, mostly effective drama like “Song Sung Blue.” Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson build a lovely middle-aged, post-divorce relationship based on mutual admiration and their love of performing. They have a life together that’s difficult and often mundane, and that’s what makes it believable. We all know Tony Award-winner Hugh Jackman can sing. When he fixes a leaky radiator, and makes us believe he can fix a leaky radiator, that’s the real surprise.
Hugh Jackman plays Mike “Lightning” Sardina, a middle-aged, divorced dad barely making ends meet as a singer in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Mike plays backup guitar in other bands. He does celebrity impersonations at state fairs. He’s also twenty years sober, and wondering when all his effort is finally going to get him somewhere. That’s he meets Claire Stingl (Kate Hudson), a divorced mother of two and a singer who does a pretty solid Patsy Cline. They talk about their dreams. They’re up front about their failures. They fall in love the way older people do: with lots of passion, certainly, but zero interest in repeating past mistakes.
Mike’s big idea is to form a Neil Diamond cover band — excuse me, a “Neil Diamond Experience” — called “Lightning and Thunder.” Claire, obviously, would be “Thunder.” It’s a pretty good idea, actually, since Neil Diamond is incredibly talented, wrote hundreds of songs, and to this day still hasn’t been completely played out by the nostalgia zeitgeist. The band starts picking up momentum, Mike and Claire get married, their kids start to bond. Everything’s going great until it goes really, really bad.
If you know the story of Mike and Claire Sardina — or if you saw Greg Kohs’ 2008 documentary, also called “Song Sung Blue” — you know they went through some hell. Kate Hudson takes the brunt of the all-caps ACTING, with a subplot that practically has “For Your Consideration” burnt onto the screen. And while she suffers, Mike steps up, setting the band aside, getting boring jobs to pay the bills, and just being there for their kids.
If you’ve ever been part of a family that hit hard times, really hard, you know how invaluable it is when a family member does the hard, tedious, thankless work. And you know how heartbreaking it is when they have to set aside their own goals to do it. Writer/director Craig Brewer gives us a lot of great musical moments — the loveliest comes early, when Mike and Claire jam in her kitchen and realize they’re bringing out the best in each other — but the best scenes aren’t about performing. They’re about getting through life so that maybe, someday, eventually, they can get back to performing.
It takes a while for Jackman and Hudson to shed their familiar personae and settle into the roles, making Mike and Claire look legitimately normal, as opposed to celebrities dressing down. It doesn’t help that Brewer shoots many of their early scenes at a romantic, dreamlike fair and performance venue, which only highlights the phoniness of celebrity impersonation — which is, in reverse, exactly what Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson are doing.
But the genuineness of the characters comes through eventually, especially when Claire’s teenage daughter Rachel (Ella Anderson) becomes a bigger part of the ensemble. She resists warming up to Mike, so by the time she’s calling him “papa” we believe they’ve really bonded. The scenes that have together are lovely, if sometimes a little bizarre. They have a moment at a hospital, when Mike needs her help, which plays like a weird joke, and possibly a scene from a horror movie. Watching that sequence through Rachel’s panicky eyes is a lot to handle. The film just made a major turn into deeper, darker waters, and nobody was ready for it, especially this family.
I’m not sure if “Song Sung Blue” will make anyone a Neil Diamond fan if they weren’t already. Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson’s renditions of less familiar ditties like “Soolaimon” and “Holly Holy” stand out the most, which is for the best, because if “Sweet Caroline” was the showstopper that’d be pretty trite, and miss the point of Mike celebrating Diamond’s whole catalogue. There was a time, in the 1990s, when a cover soundtrack like this would sell like hot cakes and bring about a mini-revival of Diamond’s greatest hits, but that seems unlikely in 2025. It can’t hurt his reputation though. Brewer’s film has boundless affection for Neil Diamond’s work, even though Diamond himself is, at most, an afterthought.
“Song Sung Blue” is a familiar song and dance routine, but it’s about a cover band. so one could argue that anything else would be disingenuous. What matters isn’t that it’s been done before, what matters is Brewer, Hudson, Jackman, Anderson and everyone else in the fine assemble cast are doing it right. What can I say, filmmakers? You got to me. (If you know what I mean.)
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