As fun and popular as his music is, you probably don’t get into the game of being Wisconsin’s number one Neil Diamond tribute band with the expectation that Hollywood is going to make a movie about you. Yet, for Mike and Claire Sardina (played here by Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson), it’s now happened twice. First, in 2008, there was the documentary of their lives and now we have the dramatized version in the form of Song Sung Blue, a charmingly easy-going midlife romcom that finds kitschy joy in the kinds of flyover state lives that a lot of other films might dismiss as sad or parochial.
Each holding down part-time jobs (him a mechanic, her a hairdresser), Mike and Claire meet thanks to their actual passion – music. Both are regulars on the musical impersonation circuit, instantly drawn to one another both romantically and professionally and it’s not long before Claire has moved herself and her kids into Mike’s house as they set up their Neil Diamond tribute act under the stage names of Lightning (Mike) and Thunder (Claire).
It’s fun, charming, low-stakes stuff, writer-director Craig Brewerstaying true to the real story by putting very few obstacles in Mike and Claire’s way in the first half. They’re both great at their music and surrounded by friends to support their dream, which is a colossal local success, and their relationship is one of the healthiest you could really see on screen. They’re both honest with themselves and each other, Mike is 20 years sober (an achievement never threatened for cheap drama), and their respective teenage daughters get on wonderfully. It gives Jackman and Hudson some wonderfully real and grounded notes to play – at its best, Song Sung Blue feels like you’ve stepped into a later season of a warm and comforting sitcom.
The flipside of this relative lack of friction (even some shockingly brutal health scares are handled with maturity and grace), is that it makes Song Sung Blue feel way, way too long. At two-and-a-quarter hours, you really have seen all it has to offer – emotionally and musically – quite a while before the credits roll. These characters are certainly likeable enough that spending the extra time with them is hardly a chore – and Brewer ensures we *really* get to know them through both his breezily domestic writing and incredibly tight, searching close-ups – but the rhythm of this story is painfully overfamiliar by the end.
Then again, that all rather suits the Neil Diamond of it all (Brewer marshals the actual music with sparkle and oomph), a musician who wrote very, very few cool songs and yet can still get a packed-out pub or bar on either side of the Atlantic singing together in full voice. Song Sung Blue won’t capture the same totemic place in people’s hearts that something like ‘Sweet Caroline’ can occupy but, in its earnest and loving depiction of the earnest and loving couple at its heart, it reminds you why that sort of sentimentality should always be more joyful than embarrassing.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 