Fun but formulaic. See Robert Duvall's "Tender Mercies" instead

Rating: Null/10 (28 January 2011)

"Crazy Heart" sees actor Jeff Bridges playing a washed up country singer with one last chance to salvage his career and make amends with his family, whom he abandoned a long time ago in favour for life on the road. Sounds familiar? The film has been compared to Darren Aronofsky's "The Wrestler", but most people don't seem to realise that Aronofsky's film was itself a giant bag of clichés.
What "Crazy Heart" has going for it are a series of brilliant sequences in which Bridges mopes around dimly lit bars, chewing on tobacco, sucking on booze, flirting with 40 year old groupies and playing some fine country music. These moody scenes, somewhat detached from the film's formulaic plot, make you wish Bridges' character were in a different movie.
When we're not in the pleasant company of musicians, barflies and bartenders, we're watching Bridges go through familiar plot beats. He hooks up with a young woman (Maggie Gyllenhaal) and her son, battles alcoholism, struggles to fit within the current market place, struggles to write new songs and has awkward telephone conversations with his long lost son. It's all very formulaic and contrived, the characters only very thinly sketched.
Still, the film is magnificently acted, and other than its bar room shenanigans has 3 more good things going for it. Actor Colin Farrell turns up as a country singer and is given an interesting subplot, the film has several cute allusions to "The Big Lebowski" (bowling alleys, the business with Bridges and the toilet, the names of characters etc), and contains several great singing and song-writing sequences.
7.9/10 – A very formulaic film with another creepy relationship between a young woman and a much older man. Still, the film's worth watching for its atmosphere. For this plot done better, see "Tender Mercies" with Robert Duvall, "The Thing Called Love", Hal Ashby's "Bound For Glory", Altman's "Prairie Home Companion" and "Nashville", "Sweet Dreams", "Songwriter", "Coal Miners Daughter" and "Be Here To Love Me: A Film About Townes Van Zandt".
Worth one viewing.