Sue the heart for remembering

Rating: 10/10 (10 February 2010)

"Crazy Heart" opens with panoramic shots of a lone pickup truck traversing the barren landscape on a road to nowhere. It's driver used to be somebody, a big-time country music star, back when Nashville was full of renegades, larger-than-life men who lived hard and never gave a second thought about the consequences. But tastes change, and old school artists like Bad Blake(Jeff Bridges) watched Nashville sell-out its bluegrass roots toward a more polished sound, an amalgamation of pop and country in order to move beyond its niche market and into the mainstream. Still, the aura of celebrity hangs around Bad Blake which allows the has-been to tour the country, a circuit consisting of bowling alleys and juke joints whose clientele while long in the tooth, appreciates real country music in the Hank Williams tradition. At the peak of his career, Bad Blake embodied his adjectival moniker with pride, romancing his hard-living ways in song, his art, a justification for all the people he disappointed over the years. "Crazy Heart" is about a man who has seen his alias metamorphosize into a judgment, and is seeking deliverance from the naming he once took pride in, with the help of a young female journalist, who has the power to give Bad his name back.
Jean Craddock(Maggie Gyllenhall), a budding music journalist for a local Tucson paper, breaks the golden rule that Lester Bangs imparted to young William Miller in Cameron Crowe's "Almost Famous", which was, "You never make friends with the rock stars." During their first meeting in a shabby motel room, Bad asks Jean not to snap any pictures, candid pictures that would suggest his down-and-out existence of alcoholism and destitution. But he grants permission to shoot him while he's performing, which she does, at a low-angle, so that Bad Blake looms large, heroic, and nothing like the disheveled man with a gut we saw back at the motel room. And once Jean starts sleeping with Bad, her story becomes compromised. What Bad needed was an expose, not a puff-piece; an expose which detailed his long-running demons would have been the wake-up call he needed to get sober. Although Jean knows the whole story, she only writes about Bad's good points; a compromised story which compromises her heart, because she edits out his alcoholism, not only in her capacity as a journalist, but as a mother, as well, when she puts her four-year-old boy in Bad's care. In essence, she dates her puff-piece; she hurts everybody- herself, her son, and even Bad, because she didn't write the whole story. It's as if Jean needed to see the pictures that Bad asked her not to take for perspective.
As a result of her relationship with Jean, Bad writes a song called "The Weary Kind" for his protégé Tommy Steele(Colin Farrell), a successful artist in the new Nashville tradition. Since the song is a smash, an argument can be made that being bad is good for the singer/songwriter. Being bad is what informs his art, albeit at the expense of a fruitful personal life. The song was supposed to be a happy one, a song about Jean when their future looked promising. Thanks to Tommy, the song acts as a beacon in which Bad hopes Jean hears his plea of undying love and lure her back. But when Jean shows up backstage after a concert, the diamond ring on her finger instantly turns "The Weary Kind" into an elegy. All he has left is the song.