1 of 5 | Kate Hudson and Hugh Jackman star in “Song Sung Blue,” in theaters Thursday. Photo courtesy of Focus Features
LOS ANGELES, Dec. 24 (UPI) — It’s official. They’ve run out of musicians so it’s time for tribute band biopics. Song Sung Blue, in theaters Thursday, feels like it is exploiting people who did not ask for the spotlight in the way celebrities have.
Mike Sardino (Hugh Jackman) is a musician in Alcoholics Anonymous. On stage, he calls himself Lightning.
At a local fair, Mike meets Claire Stengl (Kate Hudson), a Patsy Cline impersonator. Mike is a huge Neil Diamond fan and Claire inspires him to perform Diamond songs with her. He names them Lightning & Thunder.
The first half of the story is about the localized rise of Lightning & Thunder. Instead of inspiring original songs like the Bruce Springsteen or Bob Dylan biopics, Mike and Claire find the inspiration to cover Neil Diamond classics.
Mike resists opening with “Sweet Caroline” because he wants to highlight Diamond’s entire catalog. But singing the hit first gets the audience on their side to open them up to lesser known songs. It also gets the song out of the movie’s system since they can’t perform the same song for two hours.
Jackman has done Broadway, and in film The Greatest Showman and Les Misérables. In Song Sung Blue he can’t be that good, but still has to be good enough to listen to him sing for two hours.
Another positive aspect of the film is its depiction of divorcees with kids in a loving relationship. This isn’t the meet-cute of rom-coms, of which Hudson starred in many.
Mike and Claire don’t have that much flexibility, so they happen to meet while performing at the same venue. They have something to talk about, so they go back to Claire’s house and keep singing but they welcome the connection. They’re not denying it for ¾ the movie like most ingenues.
The exposition is as glaring as any biopic. Mike’s dentist (Fisher Stevens) facilitates the news that Mike is three months behind on his mortgage, shares custody of a daughter (King Princess) and wants to be himself on stage, not imitate other artists – this is before he meets Claire.
Claire also has two children, Dana (Hudson Hensley) and Rachel (Ella Anderson), and lives with her own mother (Cecelia Riddett). Lightning & Thunder eventually get to open for a major ’90s band.
Trailers have been vague about a major hardship that befalls Claire. Though it is a matter of public record, if it is indeed a spoiler, it’s where the film feels intrusive into their private life.
Even though Mike and Claire were performers, they were small venue local performers, not celebrities who have been chronicled their entire lives. They opened themselves up to a documentary, but that was them telling their own story, not super famous movie stars acting their troubles.
Regular people deserve to have their stories told as much as celebrities, but filtering them through blatant movie cliches is misguided. Assuming Jackman, Hudson and writer/director Craig Brewer had the best of intentions, there are glaring missteps.
So the hardship leads to medical bills which are unfeasible to pay for gig performers with no insurance. And the parties at fault for it will still take months to pay so Mike and Claire are left to handle it.
Treatment also leads to Claire’s opioid addiction. Meanwhile, Mike’s heart condition, which has been shown previously, rears up at inopportune times.
It’s not clear that Mike has offers to perform alone until he says it. That’s something the film should show. Without showing that, it doesn’t land as a real decision he’s making.
Furthermore, the documentary alleges that venues refused to book Claire after her injury, which is blatant discrimination. That would be a meaningful element to explore so choosing others over it raises questions.
Just showing up for his wife is enough, but financially the potential gigs may have helped the family. Rachel points out that her broken car is a metaphor for their family patching up broken things.
It really sells the real-life complexity short when characters mention interesting themes, but don’t really discuss them. Rachel says she’s bearing the brunt of the finances while Mike is out of work but this scene is the first we hear Mike is no longer at his restaurant hosting job.
Life happens to everyone so Mike and Claire have to find their way back to Lightning & Thunder again. That could be inspiring, but the path to get there turns their real-life traumas into narrative shorthand for obstacles to overcome.
It is one thing to celebrate Thunder and Lightning’s minor triumph and they deserve it. It’s hard not to feel that Song Sung Blue is exploiting their darkest periods.
Fred Topel, who attended film school at Ithaca College, is a UPI entertainment writer based in Los Angeles. He has been a professional film critic since 1999, a Rotten Tomatoes critic since 2001, and a member of the Television Critics Association since 2012 and the Critics Choice Association since 2023. Read more of his work in Entertainment.
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