Song Sung Blue Review

Craig Brewer has always been drawn to performers who are slightly too big for the rooms they play, and Mike Sardina, the Milwaukee singer who fronted a Neil Diamond tribute act called Lightning and Thunder, is the purest case yet. Hugh Jackman plays him as a man who treats sincerity as armor, and the trick of the performance is that he sings the covers straight, with no wink, so the sequined shirts stop reading as a joke about forty minutes in.

Kate Hudson is better still. Her Claire is funny and prickly early on, then has to carry a car accident, an amputation, and a long slide into prescription dependency, and she plays the recovery as grinding rather than inspirational. The best sequence puts the pair onstage opening for Pearl Jam, where one night of borrowed legitimacy says more about the act than any speech does.

Amy Vincent lights the club stages with a warm, low-wattage glow that flatters them without pretending they are filling arenas. The dialogue is the problem. Whole exchanges land like greeting-card verse read aloud, and the script keeps stopping to explain a feeling the actors already have on their faces. The late turn toward tragedy is stacked so heavily it starts to feel arranged.