A quiet, conventional film with a surprisingly firm grip, writer/director Scott Cobb's Crazy Heart will choke you up the same way it kept you hanging in over its shaggy, two-hour shuffle: effortlessly. Much of the credit for its appeal goes to the performance of the congenitally appealing Jeff Bridges as a fading country singer/songwriter known as Bad Blake. If the character of a dissolute, downtrodden quasi-celebrity is a rite of passage for leading men of a certain age (Mickey Rourke picked up the baton last year), Bridges acknowledges the inevitability and exceeds expectations with his typically self-effacing grace. The result is a performance that makes the hackneyed feel new, natural, and almost private; it has a lived-in ease that puts an audience only too familiar with the film's trajectory (and perhaps primed to count off the clichés) on notice and off-guard.
Bad Blake has got a few good habits and a whack of really bad ones. A country singer with a once-promising career, at age 57 he's humping around the country, playing a different bar, club or bowling alley every night. A performer with a deeply ingrained (if somewhat distorted) sense of professionalism, Bad (as his friends and middle-aged groupies call him) shows up on time, even if he has to blow off a rest stop and pee in a bottle to do so. It's what happens when he stops moving that's the problem: arriving in Clovis, New Mexico to play to a handful of admirers, Bad immediately makes a play for free drinks, hitting the jackpot at the local liquor store and giving his motel room a pre-show, David Hasselhoff do-over.
Bridges, capable of reaching the higher registers of peevishness with his warmly expressive voice, here settles in the gravelly nadir of Nick Nolte on a pack a day. Taking us to the pukey depths of barely functional alcoholism during his greatest hits performance (which sounds, honestly, like playing bowling alleys is pretty much the right call) Bad on a bender seems both completely perilous and par for the course. His fans and his bandmates, eager for whatever spark of greatness he is still able to give off, politely ignore his mid-song break to go barf in the alley.
It's not until a local journalist named Jean (Maggie Gyllenhaal) arrives to interview Bad that some measure of the man is summoned to peek through the persona. When she barges in on him in nothing but a towel, Bad is mortified despite the fact that we've already seen him dump his urine in a parking lot and play to a crowd with vomit on his shirt. A deeply eroded ego is a highly textured thing, and Bridges gives the vestiges of Bad's southern breeding a touching, uncalculated charm. Mostly he tolerates Jean's fangirl prodding, and as Gyllenhaal lets her voice inflate to babyish heights, we realize she sees what we cannot (yet): a true talent. Bad ends their first interview after Jean's queries about two subjects he'd rather not discuss -- a young hotshot named Tommy Sweet, with whom Bad shares history as a mentor, and his relationship with his children -- and Jean ends their second when Bad makes the inevitable boozy pass.
The relationship that develops between them is the film's most obvious contrivance, but Bridges and Gyllenhaal manage to imbue it with the random but welcome succor two lonely people can share. I tend to be indifferent to Gyllenhaal's affectations, from the slouchy sashay to the self-conscious Cheshire smile, but as Jean she is truly endearing -- vulnerable but confident, shy but curious. "My capillaries are close to the skin!" she protests, after Bad offloads a genuine compliment masquerading as a corny line, then chides her for blushing. It's a living, breathing, dealmaking moment, sweetened by the surprise of sudden intimacy; you can almost hear Bad signing up for more.
More intriguing is the relationship between Bad and Tommy Sweet, a character invoked so often and so enigmatically throughout the first half of the movie that his arrival -- especially if, like me, you hadn't seen a trailer or read about the cast -- is a pleasing surprise. It's my job, unfortunately, to spoil it for you: Colin Farrell struts onto the scene in country superstar drag--ponytail, boots, even dangly earrings -- oozing deference to Bad and asking for some songs for his next hit record. The vagaries of a working musician -- playing to a clutch of burnouts one night, 12,000 screaming fans the next -- are an apt enough suggestion of where a life lived on scraps -- of money, of adulation -- might lead you. Sweet, an arena player meant to embody the Top 40 homogenization of country music, is almost embarrassed by his success; Bad is embarrassed to have had to witness it; both men, it should be noted, perform their own songs, and no embarrassment is necessary. "Ain't remembering wonderful?" Bad grumbles in response to Tommy's puppyish reminiscences about his days as an apprentice, and as Bridges delivers it it's a line rich with poetry, a lyric waiting for its due.
Because this is, in its genes, a modest redemption flick, Bad has to do something bad -- or just stupid -- and the losses incurred must lead to his rehabilitation. The third act is the most strained in the film: Jean's trust in Bad is somewhat unforgivably betrayed, and his pain translates into both art (a lucrative songwriting gig born of good old fashioned misery; the songs here, written by T. Bone Burnett and Scott Bruton, are true to their honky-tonk pedigree) and a stint in AA (one coffee and one confessional, it seems, is all it takes to end a lifetime of drinking). Robert Duvall arrives as an old crony to add some welcome bumps to the film's otherwise smooth, uneventful landing. <What you'll remember, though, are the inflections, the animating, human detail added to people we think we know, stories we are certain have already been told.