Had me at the First Guitar Riff....

Rating: 8/10 (18 June 2010)

"Crazy Heart" is not to everyone's taste, the whole theme being done so often and so badly in some cases. However, Jeff Bridges is astonishing in it which was confirmed with his best actor Oscar win.
Bridges immerses himself in the character of Bad Blake who trashes his once successful country music career by slowly drinking and smoking himself to death. He is barely hanging on at the beginning of the movie when he pulls into the parking lot of a bowling alley, empties his urine bottle and blearily surveys the scene.
Bridges engages us at his unattractive best when he meets, Jean, played by Maggie Gyllenhaal a journalist who is embittered by men but in spite of herself gets drawn to the remnants of his charisma as she interviews him.
The story is very slender and character driven but made utterly believable by the brilliant cast.
I've always been a fan of Bridges, Gyllenhaal not so much. Her reliance on cute tics seem to be the same in all the movies I've seen her in. Bridges, on the other hand, brings something fresh to each role and here he doesn't disappoint as he shows us the last stages of alcoholism.
There were several plot flaws to my mind. No mother in her right mind would have left her 4 year old son alone with an active alcoholic, twice. But this was needed for a major plot turning point but this viewer felt it was same old same old formula driven.
Robert Duvall, who produced, gets his teeth into a bit of filler plot, not too successfully, and enchants himself, but not this viewer, with an a cappella version of a song that was meant to be 'deep' and relevant to the plot. A burp and forgiven by me due to the enormous talent of Bridges who kept me enthralled from beginning to end.
Colin Farrell excelled in a role of first fiddle dancing around second fiddle and portraying, sometimes in a totally believable self-consciousness, an unutterable kindness to his mentor, Bridges.
I'd see it again. 8 out of 10.