A standard musician biopic that loses its way as it goes

Rating: 5/10 (17 April 2010)

Musician biopics, from "Ray" to "Great Balls of Fire!," are really all the same movie. Musician gets famous, gets hooked on drugs (or just gains in ego) and becomes a jerk, falls on professional hard times, then finds his/her way to a personal salvation and immediately achieves professional success as well. Obviously, the late-life quest for redemption story is not unique to musician biopics (examples: "The Verdict," "Fearless," and "The Straight Story"). In the end, "Crazy Heart" has more in common with the latter class of redemption movies, most notably "The Wrestler," to which it bears many similarities.
The story is very simple and obvious--you can tell everything that's going to happen from a look at the poster or DVD cover--but it is fairly substantial and effective. However, the characters are not even three-dimensional enough to be called stock characters--some (Jean Craddock especially) are so patently unbelievable in their lack of dimension that I can't believe someone actually wrote them. They all have one thing that they do and that's all they do, even if they appear repeatedly. As an example, think about how many times Jean grins, sighs, then says "okay." The dialogue is also a bit off--Blake sounds awfully educated for an old musician and Tommy Sweet sounds overly sincere, to the point that he's almost as tough to take as Jean. The biggest issue here is that the final act of the movie feels like a rushed tack-on to a completed film and does not have any depth. It's just a plot device to get to an already-conceived final scene that otherwise could not exist.
The acting is generally fine, but there's also little required of anyone. Obviously, Jeff Bridges won an Oscar for this, but the truth is that he had the same expression on his face from the first shot to the last and never changed in between, just like every other "performance" of his career. His wardrobe was excellent and really conveyed his character wonderfully--it did most of the job for him. He wasn't particularly bad, because there really wasn't much for him to do. He could have looked sadder in the third act and he could have looked more panicked just before, but neither is really enough of a complaint to matter much. No one else has enough of a character for their acting even to get mentioned, even though Colin Farrell got a star entrance for the ages.
One odd aspect of the film was its composition. Throughout the entire film, Blake was constantly off-center, with seemingly no reason for it. Especially for a film that is about personal salvation, you normally want to show someone's life coming into balance by balancing the screen or else show the difficulty in that by unbalancing the screen. Scott Cooper did neither. It looked a lot like "The Wrestler," but did not have a reason for it the way that film did. It was distracting and poor technique.
However, the cinematography was quite good. The film began with low-key lighting and cool colors but changed to a much brighter lighting scheme when Tommy Sweet was around, showing us that he is the path to a brighter end for Blake. Eventually, the entire scheme warmed and brightened to show us the changes in our lead character. It wasn't terribly inventive, but it was still effective. Cooper and Barry Markowitz deserve some credit for that.
All I will say about the music is that I hate country music and this was no different. Farrell actually had a surprisingly good voice, but Bridges was not good (though far from the worst singer I've heard).
All in all, it's a pretty standard redemption movie with some major flaws. If you enjoy musician biopics, it's probably worth watching. If you enjoy country music, it's probably worth listening to. However, it's nothing special.