In a lot of the best country music, great singers elevate plain and simple songs. It’s ham and eggs made by a skilled cook. It’s the 9,000th broken heart song you’ve heard in your life made haunting and complex by a powerful voice.
It’s Jeff Bridges in Crazy Heart.
Here, he plays about the biggest country singer/songwriter cliche you’ve ever seen. He’s got the divorces. He’s got the alcoholism. He’s got the son he hasn’t seen in twenty-four years. He’s got the low-paying gigs in dive bars and bowling alleys. His name is Bad Blake and he’s a 57 year old burnout who’s lived and loved and lost and he looks just like Waylon Jennings.
It would’ve been easy to Hollywood up this guy and make him a real cornball, but Jeff Bridges inhabits the character so firmly and is so fearless about looking bad with his pale old man belly and a face with a road map’s worth of lines all over it that he saves the film. It’s such a vulnerable performance. It’s because of him that we follow so closely this simple story of an old guy who repairs his wrecked life with the inspiration of a woman and some help from a young hotshot. Bridges carries us through it as gracefully as George Jones carries us through an umpteenth performance of “He Stopped Loving Her Today”.
A lot of people think this movie is corny, and they’re almost right, but that’s not always bad. This is a rare movie that’s full of nice people. Good rural folk. Even the slick young hunk country star (Colin Farrell), a character we’re set up to hate, turns out to be a good guy. All of Blake’s problems, the film suggests, are of his own doing.
The performance by Jeff Bridges also saved the film from a direct-to-DVD fate. The Country Music Television cable network produced this on a low budget with no intention of releasing it to theaters. Word spread in the industry about the Oscar-worthy turn from Bridges and then Fox Searchlight stepped in to buy it up and give it a big theatrical release. It ended up winning Jeff Bridges enough awards (including the Oscar) to fill the bed of a Chevy Silverado and became a hit.