Jeff Bridges channels a washed-up, alcoholic country singer.

Rating: Null/10 (23 May 2010)

Jeff Bridges is Bad Blake, once the hottest thing around in country music, largely for his song-writing skills, but as we pick up the story he is barely hanging on, always almost broke, and traveling all over in his suburban to play gigs in such places as bowling alleys. People who remember his glory still want to see him, and hear him sing his popular songs, but the businessmen who run the record labels and pay the big money don't want to touch him. He has not written anything in years and his act, including his drunkenness, has long become stale.
At one of his traveling gigs his keyboard player introduces Bad to his niece, an aspiring writer. He asks Bad if he will grant her an interview, he does so reluctantly, answering as little as he can, then standing up and cutting off the conversation when asked if he has any children. It clearly is not something he is comfortable talking about.
Maggie Gyllenhaal is the writer, Jane Craddock, a single mom with a 4-year-old son. Against the odds she falls for Bad, and he falls for the kid, but he cannot do without his booze. A related incident when they were in Houston has Jane leave immediately and go back to New Mexico where she lives.
So the movie is really about this struggling 57-year-old country singer that has lost his way among the booze and easy women he meets on the road. Can he salvage his life, and can he begin to write again? Good movie, and Bridges does his own singing, and very well too. Even Colin Farrell, who has a relatively small amount of screen time, does his own singing.
SPOILERS: After Jane rejects him, tells him she and her son never want to see him again, he has his life-changing moment. He asks his old friend (Robert Duvall) to help him, he enters alcohol rehab, and starts to write again. He starts to made a decent living again. He tries to get her back but she has moved on. She realizes that she and her son can never overcome, with him, the incident where Bad lost track of the boy while stopping at a bar for a drink, after Jane told him never to drink in front of the boy. He lost the relationship, but he salvaged his life for a few more years.