Bad Blake walks hard...

Rating: 8/10 (21 February 2010)

'My tombstone will have my name on it, until then I'll just have to stay 'Bad'...' That's all we're going to get out of Bad Blake (Jeff Bridges) when queried about the real name that hides beneath his macho moniker. Making his weary way from Anywhere USA to Nowhere USA, Bad is rudderless. He trades on mild successes from years ago, plying the only craft he's ever known in the ghastliest 'venues' and bowling alleys that can afford a PA system.
With pressure on the phone from his cranky manager to get off his proverbial and write some new songs to rival the success of his former protégé, he's stuck with creative atrophy. Bad sweats to sleep in hazy brown-towelled motel rooms, he puts away more whiskey than Shane McGowan on the 31st December 1999 and looks as good with three cigarettes in his mouth as one, all the while quite skilfully refining the art of outdoor urination. Then single-mother journalist Jean Craddock (Maggie Gyllenhaal) comes calling and he hears a new melody for the first time in years...
OK, when put like that, it really does sound like a far-too-familiar bag of TV-movie clichés but that fact never occurs to you over Crazy Heart's two hours. It affects, absorbs and ultimately gratifies and it owes it all to one Jeffrey Leon Bridges.
In virtually every scene, he completely possesses Bad right down to his vomit-stained sunglasses and thatch of oily silver hair. It would be nice to say Bridges is getting better with age if he hadn't already been completely exceptional for the best part of four decades. He portrays Bad note-perfect; cantankerous but charming enough to bed himself a middle-aged redneck divorcée every night or blag a free bottle of whiskey. Tubby and suitably seasoned, his murmured words sometimes barely crack past his lips as he spouts the kind of ludicrous phrases that only a man in cowboy boots and aviators can pull off (diverting one interview with Jean by saying, 'I wanna talk about how bad you make this room look...'). It's the 57-year-old actor's finest role since he fixed himself a White Russian and saw what 'condition his condition was in' for the Coen Brothers back in 1997. There's even a nice, knowing echo of Jeffrey Lebowski in our first shot of Bad propping up a bar, looking more Dude Rancher than 'The Dude'.
Sometime actor and 1st-time director Scott Cooper (whose screenplay is adapted from Thomas Cobb's original novel) knows his story has its generic qualities, and wisely steers his film in the direction of Bridges' quality every chance he can. Unfussy but assured authoring never lets the film labour too long on the conventions of the down-and-out-troubadour-trying-to-turn-it-all-around template. Although, ironically, when the film could do with a sharper focus on certain aspects (rehab from alcoholism), it's surprisingly glossed over, but again it's the performance that holds the line through these struggles. Bridges' few scenes with an utterly perfect Robert Duvall are so effortlessly well judged that it's hard to see why the director chose to miscast other equally intrinsic roles. Colin Farrell tries his very best 'squint-and-act' in his role as the young country music superstar whose career has eclipsed that of his mentor, but it just suggests that if he'd been cast in Brokeback Mountain, it might have been rubbish. Maggie Gylenhaal also tries her best (cruelly referred to as a 'sad cartoon turtle' recently on the internet, but I could never condone that), but only really comes good with her performance when it asks for something other than falling for Bad's allure.
But let's not focus on the support acts here. We came here for the headliner and the stage belongs to Bad. Bridges is everything in Crazy Heart and as the titular song echoes over the final moments, the only thing that's missing is an encore.