You won’t see a movie with better music and worse dialogue this holiday season than the bizarrely charming “Song Sung Blue,” a biopic about a husband-and-wife Neil Diamond cover band who were a fleeting sensation in 1990s Milwaukee.
If that plot synopsis isn’t a hook, the soundtrack is packed with them, as stars Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson belt over a dozen Diamond hits including “Forever in Blue Jeans,” “I Am…I Said,” and “Holly Holy.” Of course the couple they’re playing, Mike and Claire Sardina, a.k.a. Lightning & Thunder, also do “Sweet Caroline,” although they disagree over where it belongs in the set list. Mike prefers last, allowing them to showcase his idol’s range beforehand. Claire insists it come first after an incident when withholding it triggers a biker brawl.
Written and directed by Craig Brewer (“Hustle & Flow”), the movie is itself a cover of Greg Kohs’ 2008 documentary on the Sardinas, also titled “Song Sung Blue.” The original is a quirky little indie that reveals truth to be weirder than fiction. What happens to Mike and Claire is so outlandish that you’d roll your eyes if Brewer also included the facts that their real-life wedding climaxed with a concert for a thousand people at the Wisconsin State Fair and that the groomsmen wore tuxedo T-shirts.
Both films are love stories, even if the new version compresses Mike and Claire’s decade and a half marriage into two years. He’s a divorced auto mechanic and recovering alcoholic with a surly-but-sweet distant daughter named Angela (King Princess) and a bit of local renown. She’s a single mom to son Dayna (Hudson Hensley) and her own daughter, Rachel (Ella Anderson), when Mike struts into her life wearing lightning bolts on his jacket and tooth. His manager, Dave (Fisher Stevens), is also his dentist.
This is a script that shows and tells. If Mike jokes that Dave deserves a free oil change for missing out on a $10 commission, then you better believe the movie will cut to him under the car doing the job. Every character blurts out exactly what they want with the gusto of belting out ba-ba-baaaah at a certain Neil Diamond chorus.
“I gotta be Neil but I gotta be me too,” Mike says urgently. A couple scenes later, Hudson’s Claire turns to Rachel and pleads, “I just want to sing and feel happy and be loved!” Likewise, as soon as their kids are thrust together on an awkward playdate, the girls get stoned, trauma-bonding about their unstable parents, a cute and corny moment that ensures the audience knows the risks if Lightning & Thunder are forced to hang up their spangles.
The twosome are backed by a tour booker, Tom (Jim Belushi), who dreams of getting them a residency in Vegas, and a motley crew of fellow mimics including a Buddy Holly (Michael Imperioli) and a James Brown (Mustafa Shakir). Shyaporn Theerakulstit, Chacha Tahng and Faye Tamasa have some nice moments as Thai restaurateurs who welcome the Sardinas’ family into their own. Often though, you find yourself watching Anderson as the anxious Rachel who seems most in tune with reality. Can her mom and stepdad’s fantasies of fame actually pay their rent?
There’s a spoiler in the trailer that I recommend avoiding if you can. The argument for it must have been that no one wants to see a musical about two Midwesterners in rhinestones unless something bad happens to them. Most rock biopics have a similar rise-and-fall-and-rise arc; it’s a cliché that works, like plugging “Sweet Caroline” into a bar’s jukebox. But what gives “Song Sung Blue” a wonky kind of depth is that there’s only so high Mike and Claire can rise. When the real-life couple was fired from a steady booking, the club owner justified his actions by saying, “Especially being in Neil Diamond impersonation, your limits are Neil Diamond.”
Fans will counter that the songwriter’s gifts are so ceaseless that younger generations might not even connect each hit with his name. Bopping along to the movie feels like being at a pub trivia night where the answer is always Neil Diamond: That’s right, he also wrote The Monkees’ “I’m a Believer.” Begrudgingly, you half-buy into one of the script’s more ludicrous set-ups, that Lightning & Thunder will play their biggest show on the night Diamond is headlining at another venue in town. The greater metro population of Milwaukee is just shy of one and half million people. Sure, why not.
Grinding plot gears aside, the duo’s actual biggest gig is pretty awesome: In 1995, Eddie Vedder invited Lightning & Thunder to open for Pearl Jam. (“What’s a Pearl Jam?” Mike asks.) The quirky mash-up of sequins and flannel gets reenacted here, but this would be a richer movie if it explored why a Seattle grunge band rocketing toward mega-stardom would whisk this act along for the ride. Appreciation for Diamond’s lyrical craft? Respect for the Sardinas’ genuine talents? Or just kitsch?
That Lightning & Thunder peaked when Gen Xers were ascendant makes you yearn for Brewer to grapple with how much of their fan base was ironic. That question, along with Diamond’s ear worms, won’t stop wriggling in my brain. The closest answer I’ve found is in a “Simpsons” episode from around the same time where Homer takes the stage at a cartoon version of Lollapalooza. (“He’s cool,” a pierced punk says with a snort. A buddy asks if he’s being sarcastic, and the kid collapses like a hot air balloon: “I don’t even know anymore.”)
“Song Sung Blue” couldn’t be less cool. But the Sardinas were completely sincere and Jackman and Hudson honor their innocence by playing them straight. (Brewer, however, can’t resist a pratfall where Mike trips singing “Cracklin’ Rosie” in his skivvies.) Jackman looks and sounds so much like Diamond that the concert scenes feel like top-fleet karaoke, and Hudson more than holds her own, even as her Claire is tasked to stare at her husband with starry eyes that sparkle as much as her silver makeup.
Hudson encourages the audience to use Claire’s stubborn buoyancy and perky accent as a life raft when Lightning & Thunder are deluged by extremely bad luck. But the beat Hudson gets exactly right comes in a scene where you’re certain this klutzy melodrama is going to force her to sob. Instead, she refuses. She smiles, and that’s the detail that breaks your heart.
So I cried for her. Then I groaned some more and while I didn’t need an encore, I left the theater humming.
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