Mike Sardina (played by Hugh Jackman)
“I want to sing and be happy and feel loved. And I don’t want everything to be such a big deal.”
Claire Sardina (played by Kate Hudson)
There is something special about this movie in its unabashed earnestness. The main characters, a married couple named Mike and Claire Sardina, have been through troubles in their respective lives before they meet each other. Mike was in the Vietnam War, utilized as a tunnel rat, crawling over dead bodies. He spent his early adulthood as an alcoholic, ultimately undermining his first marriage. Claire is also divorced, middle-aged, also with kids left over from her previous marriage.
But the movie does not find these people in the depths of depression. Mike is celebrating his 20th Sober Anniversary at Alcoholics Anonymous. He sings to his group Neil Diamond’s Song Sung Blue, a song about how having the blues, putting them into a song, and singing them out again makes you feel a whole lot better. Mike moonlights as a singer named “Lighting” and a guitar player in a local Mo-Town band “The Esquires”. Claire moonlights as a Patsy Cline impersonator. They meet at the local state fair and become attached both romantically and professionally. They have lived long enough to know what is important to their lives and recognize that the other is on the exact same page.
What Mike and Claire Sardina decide to do is form a band and get married. The band will mainly rely on cover songs of Neil Diamond. As Mike is already “Lightning”, Claire will be “Thunder” and they will be known as “Lightning and Thunder.” This is a real band and it was apparently beloved in the Milwaukee, Wisconsin region, enough so that it became the subject of a 2008 documentary of “Song Sung Blue”. Hugh Jackman, as good of a song-and-dance-man as he is an action star, is great as Mike in both acting and performances. Kate Hudson, recently nominated for an Oscar for this role, is in her best role and movie since her first nomination in Almost Famous (2000), 26 years ago.
The musical biopic is a relatively stable and conservative sub-genre of movie. Take an up-and-coming actor and marry them with a musician that they kinda look like (say Timothee Chalamet and Bob Dylan, Jeremy Allan White and Bruce Springsteen). Drawing on the star power of both, you can then sleep-walk yourself through the screenplay of the artist’s life punctuating it every 10-15 minutes with well known songs. “Song Sung Blue” is unique in that it is a musical biopic with Neil Diamond songs, but is not about Neil Diamond. (It is also not entirely fictional like ABBA’s Mamma Mia) Instead, it is about some real people that were deeply touched by Neil Diamond’s work, then went out into the world to spread the joy like evangelists. Imagine being Neil Diamond and waking up one day to realize that you had a part in this story without ever meeting the people in it. What better tribute could there be to an artist’s music than this?
“Song Sung Blue” is directed and written for the screen by Craig Brewer who has had an interesting career. He started with two very good movies, “Hustle and Flow” (2005) and “Black Snake Moan” (2006), the former of which is one of the better movies ever made about making music from scratch. Although these two movies achieved some critical acclaim, Craig Brewer didn’t become one of those directors that gets to choose his next projects. Instead, he became a television episode director (most notably Empire) and made some movies for other people (a 2011 remake of Footloose, Eddie Murphy’s My Name is Dolemite and Coming 2 America). In a way, “Song Sung Blue” after a period of almost twenty years, is his next movie. Craig Brewer saw the documentary in 2008 and has been wanting to make this movie ever since.
Song Sung Blue is an exceptionally well directed and edited movie with a deep technical knowledge of how to utilize music in a narrative framework. Take for example the song “Play Me”, which starts as a rehearsal between Mike and Claire Sardina in Claire’s home with the two characters providing voices and instrumentation for the song in the scene. The movie then cuts to a scene at the state fair (earlier in the day, I think) where Mike and Claire are walking along and talking about their past marriages. While they are doing this, the song (their voices and instrumentation) continues to play in the background of the scene. And then the movie goes back to the rehearsal even though this technically does not make temporal sense. But because it works so well emotionally, it does not seem obvious the leaps in movie logic that the director is making. Music is very much like that. Another example is the montage that accompanies the song “Sweet Caroline”, which covers at least a year of narrative development. (Mike and Claire are the type of couple who get married and then provide the entertainment at the reception. Hundreds of people attend their wedding, which is one of many events that takes place during that song.) Other songs like “Forever in Blue Jeans” and “Soolaiman” are straight up stage musical numbers. The latter is not a well known Neil Diamond song, but Criag Brewer uses it as the big musical finale. He does a good job of setting it up throughout the movie with Mike Sardina consistently referring to it as a great Neil Diamond song that is not “Sweet Caroline.” By the time it starts, you genuinely want to hear what it sounds like. All of this work. And the music. Listen, I knew about half the songs. The others I heard for the first time and they were all great and seamlessly worked within the narrative framework of the movie. I’ve been listening to the movie’s soundtrack on repeat for the past two weeks.
Because of the real life contours and detours in the lives of Mike and Claire Sardina, including employment gaps, unpaid bills, and a bizarre car accident that claims the leg of Claire Sardina, the movie does not need any human antagonists. Everyone in this movie is on the same team. Fisher Stevens plays Mike Sardina’s dentist/manager. Jim Belushi provides logistics. Even Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam comes in and lends a hand. The result is one of those movies where the drama is all the characters against the world as opposed to the characters against each other. This makes for several beautiful moments. I especially liked the scene where Mike Sardina puts on a one-man performance for the owner of a Thai restaurant that employs him three times a week utilizing the karaoke machine. The night happens to be the birthday of the owner’s recently deceased wife. So Mike trades singing sad songs with him (Neil Diamond’s “I Am…I Said”) while the owner gets drunk. This reminded me of the one-man performance Llewyn Davis gives to his father.
I looked into the real life story of Mike and Claire Sardina after watching this movie. The documentarian of the 2008 documentary, Greg Kohs is credited as a co-writer here. Like many movies based on real events, there are certain changes made to achieve a more cohesive storyline. For instance, instead of opening for Pearl Jam, Eddie Vedder invited Lighting and Thunder onstage for an encore performance at Milwaukee’s Summer Fest. Then they sang “Forever in Blue Jeans” together. It makes sense for them to present that differently in the movie. I am very happy to report one of the main differences between this movie and real life. In the movie, it appears that the events take place within the space of a few years. Notice the lack of age progression in the children. In real life, Mike and Claire Sardina started singing together in 1989, married each other in 1994, the car accident occurred in 1999, and Mike died in 2006. That means the good times encompassed a much longer period in real life, which is a great thing to know.
