This article contains spoilers.
She’s a middle-aged, blue-collar amputee who sings backup in a kitschy Neil Diamond cover band. “I don’t want to be a hairdresser,” she says with a heavy Wisconsin accent. “I want to sing and dance.”
It’s not exactly a role that shouts Oscar. At first glance, it reads more like Razzie bait.
But the right actress in the right part: As played by Kate Hudson in the musical bio-dramedy “Song Sung Blue,” arriving in theaters on Christmas Day, the character, Claire, transcends her movie-of-the-week attributes — so much so that Hudson could land in the best actress race at the Academy Awards. She has already been nominated for a Golden Globe for her performance. Through genuine word of mouth, not the publicist-orchestrated prattle that often drives awards season consensus, Hollywood insiders are saying it’s the best work of her career.
“There are performances that remind us what we already know,” Clayton Davis, the chief awards editor at Variety, wrote in a column, “and then there are performances that shatter our assumptions entirely, forcing us to reckon with a talent we’d somehow managed to underestimate.”
A talent pigeonholed is more precise.
In 2001, when she was 22, Hudson was favored to win the best supporting actress Oscar for her layered performance as the rock ’n’ roll muse Penny Lane in “Almost Famous.” She lost to Marcia Gay Harden (“Pollock”). Hudson then became a rom-com queen, starring in the seminal “How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days” with Matthew McConaughey and the decidedly not seminal “You, Me and Dupree” with Owen Wilson and Matt Dillon.
In the years since, Hudson has largely been cinematic wallpaper, periodically popping up in a romantic comedy of uneven quality. She tried to show different sides of herself, appearing in the 2009 musical “Nine” and playing a socialite who accuses her Black chauffeur of rape in the 2017 indie civil-rights drama “Marshall.” In 2022, she received positive reviews for her turn as a narcissistic fashion mogul in “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery.”
But studios kept pushing Hudson back into the rom-com lane.
“Every time I tried to pivot, the industry continued to see me in a certain way,” Hudson said in a recent video interview. “It’s just the way the town works — how you’re branded. You don’t always get considered for things that you know you can do.”
At first, the same thing happened with “Song Sung Blue.”
Hudson’s agent sent her Craig Brewer’s script in 2023. Based on a truth-is-stranger-than-fiction documentary of the same name, “Song Sung Blue” is the bittersweet story of a middle-aged couple, Mike and Claire Sardina, and their urge to entertain. Madly in love, they start a Neil Diamond tribute band in Milwaukee in the 1990s. Mike, with his shirt unbuttoned to his navel (obviously), belts out rhinestone-wrapped anthems like “Sweet Caroline” and “Forever in Blue Jeans.” Claire plays keyboard and sings backup while smiling rapturously and sporting big hair. (She’s a former beautician, after all.)
They call themselves Lightning & Thunder. Ultimately, the Sardinas suffer personal setbacks, including the partial loss of her leg in a freak accident, which leads to depression and a painkiller dependency.
“I read it, and I loved it,” Hudson said. “It had this old-school crowd-pleaser feel to it, where you think it’s going one direction, and then it just tears your heart out. It entertains you, and then it moves you.”
Brewer, who also directed “Song Sung Blue,” was interested in Hudson. They had discussed working together in the past. “She has this wonderful approachability that translates onto the screen — audiences root for her as one of them,” Brewer said. “I always felt that there was a dramatic movie in her where she could still touch into that accessibility, but really show people her range.”
Other actresses were also chasing the part, however. “It’s not like Kate was necessarily at the top of everybody else’s list,” Brewer said.
Then came a fortuitous 2024 appearance on “CBS News Sunday Morning.” Hudson had been booked on the show to promote her debut as a singer-songwriter — something she told CBS had always been a dream, but that she had to push through self-doubt to achieve. Hudson said she had been dissuaded from releasing an album. (“You’re too old.”) And she spoke about writing a song for her eldest son, Ryder, who had recently left home for college. As she recounted the anecdote, Hudson broke down in tears.
Hugh Jackman, whom Brewer had already cast as Mike Sardina, a.k.a. Lightning, happened to be watching. It struck him: In some ways, Hudson was Thunder, a mom with moxie who decided in her 40s to take a chance on herself, who refused to let her passion for singing shrivel into regret just because she was no longer young.
With the shake of a tambourine, Hudson had the role. Good times never seemed so good!
HUDSON MAY BE IN HER 40s, but she’s not Milwaukee, beer-and-brats 40s. She’s the movie-star Westside of Los Angeles version: yoga-toned and cosmetically smoothed. “Sometimes it’s fun to have a forehead that doesn’t move,” Hudson said with a laugh.
In 2013, when she was growing frustrated with her Hollywood options (and looking for work that would keep her close to her young children in Los Angeles), she co-founded the activewear line Fabletics. The brand amplified her California cool image, which has lately been on display in “Running Point,” a breezily comedic Netflix series; Hudson plays a former party girl who suddenly gains control of an L.A. Lakers-type basketball team owned by her family. (She’s blasted as a “nepo crone” in one episode, a funny line that perhaps functions as an in-joke: Hudson is Goldie Hawn’s daughter.)
All of which makes Hudson’s vanity-free performance in “Song Sung Blue” rather startling. Thunder has pudge hanging over the top of her control-top pantyhose. Like most of us, she has bags under her eyes and long ago acquiesced to crow’s feet. In a lot of scenes, Hudson goes without makeup. Multiple times, she limps through the living room looking like bad-breath smells.
“I didn’t get Botox for like a year,” Hudson said. “There were no facials happening. No spa days. And I gained 15 pounds.”
Oscar voters love it when stars shed their glamorous personas. It shows artistic commitment. See: McConaughey in “Dallas Buyers Club,” Charlize Theron in “Monster” and a dozen others.
But whether Hudson is able to break into the Oscar race depends in some ways on whether voters give the movie itself a chance. Neil Diamond’s unapologetically earnest music can send intelligentsia noses skyward. “Song Sung Blue” also treats its blue-collar subjects with dignity, which is somewhat unusual for a Hollywood movie. The Sardinas live in a run-of-the-mill suburban house where yesterday’s supper undoubtedly still hangs in the air. She makes her own clothes. He changes his own oil. These things aren’t presented as evidence of a sad existence. It’s the opposite: These people are resilient.
“It’s not a cynical film,” Hudson said. “At some point, films started having to be cynical or crazy depressing or hard to watch in order to be considered art.”
She likened “Song Sung Blue,” which cost Focus Features an estimated $30 million to make, to Touchstone movies from the 1980s and ’90s. Now largely dormant, the Disney-owned Touchstone made heartstring tuggers like “Beaches” and “Dead Poets Society” and montage-heavy mainstream comedies like “Pretty Woman” and “Sister Act.”
Brewer is known for “Hustle & Flow” (2005) and “Dolemite Is My Name” (2019), both of which explore the ennui of midlife. He said he pursued “Song Sung Blue,” in part, because Lightning and Thunder reminded him of performers he had encountered over the years in Memphis, where he lives.
“They’re just a stone’s throw away from unbearably cheesy,” Brewer said. “The kind where you’re like, ‘I don’t know if I can watch this guy.’ But then they do a Journey song and you’re like, ‘Oh, wow, they’re killing it.’”
TO PREPARE, HUDSON WATCHED YouTube Videos of people with prosthetics. She also studied Claire in the “Song Sung Blue” documentary, paying particular attention to how she moved. “Shoulders and arms, and she loves her tambo,” Hudson said.
But she decided not to meet Claire Sardina, who lives outside Milwaukee and still performs, before filming began. “I think Craig worried that I would get too attached to her,” Hudson said. “He wanted me to lean on my instincts.”
The two eventually met when Sardina and her daughter visited the set. For the record, Thunder approves of her portrayal. “Kate did such an amazing job, especially during the sad moments — and I’ve definitely had my share of those,” Sardina said in a video call. “I was in tears a lot while watching her. We had a box of tissues and most of them were gone.” (What did she think of Hudson getting the role? “I had just woken up from a nap when I found out, and I thought I was still dreaming,” she said.)
For the most part, Wisconsin dwellers are unapologetic about their singsong lilt, and Thunder is no exception. To Brewer’s surprise, Hudson nailed it on the first try.
“All of a sudden, this accent came out of her, and I was like, ‘What the hell is that?’” he said.
Hudson explained that she grew up with a nanny, Kathy Heller, who was a proud Milwaukeean. In the late 1990s, Heller became Hudson’s assistant, retiring only last year and moving back to the Badger State.
“I asked Craig, ‘Can I lean into this? Are they going to let me do an accent this heavy?’” Hudson recalled.
He responded enthusiastically. Every once in awhile, however, Brewer pulled her back.
She laughed as she recounted what Brewer would tell her on set when things started to nudge toward mockumentary: “Maybe take a little butter off that toast.”
Brooks Barnes covers all things Hollywood. He joined The Times in 2007 and previously worked at The Wall Street Journal.
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