Song Sung Blue
First screened and reviewed in December 2025
Director: Craig Brewer. Cast: Hugh Jackman, Kate Hudson, Ella Alexander, King Princess, Hudson Hensley, Jim Belushi, Fisher Stevens, Michael Imperioli, Mustafa Shakir, Jayson Warner Smith, Cecelia Riddett, John Beckwith, Shyaporn Theerakulstit, Chacha Tahng, Faye Tamasa, Sean Allan Krill, Jim Conroy, Carey Van Driest, Eva Kaminsky, Leah Curney, Ben Krieger. Screenplay: Craig Brewer (based on the documentary by Greg Kohs). In Brief:
The film's glory and folly is how much it trusts its emotional pulls to override its flaws and vulgarities. They do!
VOR:③
Sure, roll your eyes, but there's something brave in making a movie without conceived its audience in Blue/Red terms. So retro it's kinda hip.
I don't make the rules, they just are. And one of them is that sometimes a movie that isn't even always "good" manages to be kinda great—across the whole and in many of its earnest, dopey, vulnerable, funny, connection-seeking, borderline crass, straight-to-the-heart-in-your-throat particulars. Song Sung Blue will aggravate a lot of people and I could nitpick if I wanted, but the movie buys in totally to its own story goals and its own emotional life, which range more widely than I'd assumed they would. That counts for a lot with me, and it especially did tonight.
Characters in Song Sung Blue come and go according to weird rhythms. You have to take completely on faith some of what the script asserts, or be cool with feeling unsure about several fundamentals. Is she a hairdresser? What's "the shop," and what does he do there? Is someone taking these kids to school? Don't two of the step-siblings seem more like a couple? How are both of those same two in the dread Alison Lohman Zone where you absolutely have no idea what age the actors are, or what age the characters are meant to be?
I noticed all this (you sort of can't not), but none of it mattered to me. The affective throughlines and the tragimusicomical engineering played me like a Casio and a guitar. Hugh Jackman is committed as heck to this part and this project, and I can forgive that his version of commitment comes, as usual, with a little strain and a little bit of showboating that's separate from the character's. There are things about Jackman that are wrong for this part but he convinced me he was wonderful for it. Ella Anderson, in the standout supporting role, shows us that the Mae Whitman Factory is still humming while so many others in our nation have closed, and it has generated a really promising new product line. And Kate Hudson is so good, so exuberant, so detailed and inspired from moment to moment, and so capable of shutting all her lights off in a way that makes you feel this whole family and this whole movie are not going to make it without her. I finally understand what the whole Kate Hudson experiment has been working toward. She's a treasure here.
Song Sung Blue is both a risky thing to release into a world of permanently politicized discourse about everything and a viable contender to drive its Badger Bus right past that increasingly jammed-up highway and to take you someplace that proudly pop movies are uniquely able to go. I predict that it will catch a lot of flak—you can easily guess what types while you're watching—but I also predict it will be a huge hit and a balm to many people, as it was to me. I'll be delighted if/when that happens. And in that happy eventuality, I will feel that part of the reason Song Sung Blue worked, creatively and commercially, beyond just well-earned and widespread affection for Neil Diamond, is that Jackman and Hudson have both basically succeeded at a very difficult 21st-century task of showing clearly where their hearts and their convictions lie as people while keeping their shop doors wide open to anyone who wants to walk through them. For an exact quarter-century apiece, since X-Men and Almost Famous, they've each made some art, a good deal more junk (good and bad), they've made silly throwaways, they've slipped on the ice of bad material that should have been easy to avoid, and they've pulled a couple rabbits out of hats, especially when partnered with the right people. Both have often seemed ingenuous to a fault, and like a fast-food version of a classic Actor/Celebrity recipe. But another way to say that is that neither has ever played down to their vehicles, and neither has velvet-roped any genre or any demo out of their audience. You can't just step into a goofy-earnest and earnest-earnest Middle American movie like Song Sung Blue, much less make that movie sing, if you haven't built a career that's already informed by all these tones and priorities, even when they haven't always panned out artistically.
Those same qualities make Hudson and Jackman good matches for Diamond, whose art shares most of the traits I've just tried to describe, and good matches also for director Craig Brewer, who proved as early as Hustle & Flow and Black Snake Moan that he cares more about connecting with our guts than with appealing to our analytic capacities (and those films, like Song Sung Blue, were all the better for it as far as I'm concerned).
I wouldn't want every movie to be like Song Sung Blue, which absolutely could use some beautifying touch-ups and a few homemade repairs to its engine block. If anyone tried to imitate this film, let's just say lightning would be unlikely to strike twice. So much I value about cinematic ambition, nuance, innovation, and depth is nowhere detectable here. But there's heart to spare (how often is that true anymore, anywhere?), plus a lot of uninhibited, affectively vital pop craft that many movies miss these days when they aspire to them at all. Watching Song Sung Blue feels like listening to "Livin' on a Prayer" or "Don't Stop Believin.'" It's classic rock in a Top 40 key, and I assure you that's a compliment. I may not feel quite as walking-on-air when I re-read this review in the morning or the next time I see the movie, but I can pretty much promise there will be a next time. Grade:B
(I originally wrote this review on Letterboxd, where you can comment if you like.)
