{"id":2209825,"date":"2025-12-23T14:23:57","date_gmt":"2025-12-23T14:23:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/?p=2209825"},"modified":"2025-12-23T14:23:57","modified_gmt":"2025-12-23T14:23:57","slug":"hugh-jackman-kate-hudson-make-somewhat-beautiful-noise","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/hugh-jackman-kate-hudson-make-somewhat-beautiful-noise\/","title":{"rendered":"Hugh Jackman, Kate Hudson Make Somewhat Beautiful Noise"},"content":{"rendered":"

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It\u2019s easy to be cynical about a heartwarming musical biopic like \u201cSong Sung Blue<\/a>.\u201d Heck, if anything that cynicism is reasonable \u2014 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\u2019ll love, they\u2019ll laugh, they\u2019ll cry, they\u2019ll suffer. They\u2019ll start from nothing and eventually play a big venue. You\u2019ve already seen this movie. It just didn\u2019t have Neil Diamond songs before.<\/p>\n

But here\u2019s the thing: Cynicism is also a dime a dozen, and if you check, I think you\u2019ll find it\u2019s hitting its expiration date. Life is too damn hard to get so damn mad about a sweet, mostly effective drama like \u201cSong Sung Blue.\u201d 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\u2019s difficult and often mundane, and that\u2019s 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\u2019s the real surprise.<\/p>\n

Hugh Jackman plays Mike \u201cLightning\u201d 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\u2019s also twenty years sober, and wondering when all his effort is finally going to get him somewhere. That\u2019s 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\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n

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\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\"Sinners\"\t\t\t\t\t<\/a><\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Mike\u2019s big idea is to form a Neil Diamond cover band \u2014 excuse me, a \u201cNeil Diamond Experience\u201d \u2014 called \u201cLightning and Thunder.\u201d Claire, obviously, would be \u201cThunder.\u201d It\u2019s a pretty good idea, actually, since Neil Diamond is incredibly talented, wrote hundreds of songs, and to this day still hasn\u2019t 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\u2019s going great until it goes really, really bad.<\/p>\n

If you know the story of Mike and Claire Sardina \u2014 or if you saw Greg Kohs\u2019 2008 documentary, also called \u201cSong Sung Blue\u201d \u2014 you know they went through some hell. Kate Hudson takes the brunt of the all-caps ACTING, with a subplot that practically has \u201cFor Your Consideration\u201d 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

If you\u2019ve 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 \u2014 the loveliest comes early, when Mike and Claire jam in her kitchen and realize they\u2019re bringing out the best in each other \u2014 but the best scenes aren\u2019t about performing. They\u2019re about getting through life so that maybe, someday, eventually, they can get back to performing.<\/p>\n

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\u2019t 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 \u2014 which is, in reverse, exactly what Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson are doing. <\/p>\n

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\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\"Blake\t\t\t\t\t<\/a><\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

But the genuineness of the characters comes through eventually, especially when Claire\u2019s teenage daughter Rachel (Ella Anderson) becomes a bigger part of the ensemble. She resists warming up to Mike, so by the time she\u2019s calling him \u201cpapa\u201d we believe they\u2019ve 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not sure if \u201cSong Sung Blue\u201d will make anyone a Neil Diamond fan if they weren\u2019t already. Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson\u2019s renditions of less familiar ditties like \u201cSoolaimon\u201d and \u201cHolly Holy\u201d stand out the most, which is for the best, because if \u201cSweet Caroline\u201d was the showstopper that\u2019d be pretty trite, and miss the point of Mike celebrating Diamond\u2019s 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\u2019s greatest hits, but that seems unlikely in 2025. It can\u2019t hurt his reputation though. Brewer\u2019s film has boundless affection for Neil Diamond\u2019s work, even though Diamond himself is, at most, an afterthought.<\/p>\n

\u201cSong Sung Blue\u201d is a familiar song and dance routine, but it\u2019s about a cover band. so one could argue that anything else would be disingenuous. What matters isn\u2019t that it\u2019s 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.) \u00a0<\/p>\n

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\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\"(Credit:\t\t\t\t\t<\/a><\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n

\u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.thewrap.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s easy to be cynical about a heartwarming musical biopic like \u201cSong Sung Blue.\u201d Heck, if anything that cynicism is reasonable \u2014 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2209826,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25173],"tags":[366978,366985,35108,309934,366977],"class_list":["post-2209825","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-artists","tag-craig-brewer","tag-ella-anderson","tag-hugh-jackman","tag-kate-hudson","tag-song-sung-blue"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/Hugh-Jackman-Kate-Hudson-Make-Somewhat-Beautiful-Noise.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2209825","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2209825"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2209825\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2209827,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2209825\/revisions\/2209827"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2209826"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2209825"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2209825"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2209825"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}