Craig Brewer (2025)
Mike Sardina (Hugh Jackman) and Claire Stingl (Kate Hudson) first meet backstage among other tribute acts on the bill for the Wisconsin State Fair. She’s Patsy Cline. He’s tired of being Don Ho (Hawaiian pop) and others – his music hero is Neil Diamond. Mike and Claire join forces to front a Diamond tribute band, Lightning and Thunder. Lightning Mike is the main vocalist, Thunder Claire alongside him on keyboards and backing vocals; they sometimes duet. They’re soon local celebrities, performing in and beyond their native Milwaukee. Even sooner, Mike and Claire fall in love and marry. She has a son and daughter from her first marriage; Mike’s daughter sometimes pays a visit from Florida (where she lives with her mother); they all get on well together. Song Sung Blue is pleasant to watch but, after an hour or so, I was wondering how on earth it could keep going for an hour more. (The film runs 132 minutes.) Moments later, an out-of-control car ran into Claire and Craig Brewer’s musical drama promptly turned into One Trauma After Another.
The screen announces at the start that the film is ‘based on a true love story’. By the end, it’s become so mawkish that you sincerely hope Brewer, who also wrote the screenplay, hasn’t followed the biographical facts too closely. He hasn’t quite done so (if Wikipedia and Google AI are to be believed). It’s true that Mike and Claire Sardina were Lightning and Thunder, that the band performed successfully in and on either side of the 1990s, and on one occasion were an opening act for a famous rock group called Pearl Jam (whom I’d never heard of). It’s also true that Claire lost a leg after being hit by a car in the Sardinas’ front garden and eventually returned to performing wearing a prosthetic limb. Mike Sardina really was a recovering alcoholic and really did have serious heart problems, which may have caused the fall in which he sustained a fatal head injury in 2006. I’ve not seen anything, though, to back up the standout melodramatic coincidences in Song Sung Blue. That, for example, while Claire was in intensive care after the car accident, Mike went into cardiac arrest in an adjacent hospital room, where Claire’s daughter Rachel (Ella Anderson) saved the day with defibrillator paddles. Or that, moments after Lightning and Thunder’s sold-out, triumphant comeback concert at Milwaukee’s Ritz Theater, Mike died suddenly, in the car taking him and Claire to a nearby venue to meet his idol Neil Diamond for the first time. The Sardinas’ true story might seem heart-warming/-breaking enough to manage without these tragic contrivances, but Craig Brewer (Hustle & Flow (2005), Dolemite Is My Name (2019) etc) clearly thought otherwise.
Perhaps that was a commercial calculation – was Hugh Jackman’s casting another? The Sardinas’ story had been the subject of a documentary feature by Greg Kohs, but some time ago, in 2008. (The documentary, also entitled Song Sung Blue, is much shorter – 85 minutes.) Jackman’s star standing and success in screen musicals as different as Les Misérables (2012) and that baffling box-office smash The Greatest Showman (2017), must have appealed to the production companies involved. But Jackman is so wrong for the role – and from the word go. You don’t need to know how the real Mike Sardina looked (I didn’t) to be sure it wasn’t like this. Even before Mike cultivates a Neil Diamond big-hairdo, Jackman is obviously made up to simulate someone he’s not. More important, he’s just not the right type – 6’ 2“ tall, Hugh Jackman isn’t a little guy in the metaphorical sense either. After returning from service in Vietnam, Mike Sardina worked in Milwaukee as a car mechanic and handyman: there’s nothing blue-collar about the man playing him. Bringing to life the glitzy adornments and underdog brio of the tribute acts world – a showbiz bargain basement – is the story’s most promising element, but among the collection of wannabe eccentrics he rubs shoulders with, Jackman is like visiting royalty. In a bit early on, Mike, alone at home in his shirt and underpants, sings along to ‘Cracklin’ Rosie’; moving too enthusiastically to the music, he falls over, lands on his knee, and yells in pain – comedy pain. This is Jackman showing himself game for anything, a good sport, yet embarrassing to watch. (It’s the same feeling I had decades ago, whenever Julie Andrews pretended to have the common touch.) None of this would matter too much, of course, if Jackman were a more penetrating actor; conscientious as he is, though, he nearly always seems removed from a character. When Mike bashes his knee, Jackman proficiently goes through the motions of physical vulnerability. The effect is the same when he tries expressing the emotional kind.
The other tribute acts are barely even character sketches; they’re used, rather, as an oddball chorus in set pieces like Mike and Claire’s wedding ceremony. While Lightning and Thunder are out of action, as Claire struggles to come to terms with her disability and the drugs she’s been prescribed, Mike gets work performing at a Thai restaurant whose owner (Shyaporn Theerakulstit) is a big Neil Diamond fan – a cultural anomaly that’s funny in itself, according to Craig Brewer. The trio playing Mike and Claire’s kids – King Princess and Hudson Hensley, along with Ella Anderson – all do as well as can be expected but Brewer has no time for fleshing out their characters or describing the development of blended-family relationships. As well as her life-saving scene, Claire’s daughter Rachel is allowed to have an unplanned pregnancy and give birth, but this is just one of the supporting crises in the film’s second half.
Song Sung Blue’s salvation is Kate Hudson. She’d only just turned twenty when she appeared in Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous (2000), which remains the biggest success of her career to date. Even though Song Sung Blue probably won’t change that, Hudson is receiving well-deserved plaudits for her work in Craig Brewer’s film. Unlike her co-star, she seems socially spot-on. In the early scenes, she’s entirely convincing as a working single mother and hairdresser. Onstage and offstage, she’s terrifically vivid (which naturally increases the impact of Claire’s depression after the accident). Perhaps there’s a fusion of Claire’s performing appetite and Hudson’s relishing a part she can get her teeth into; if so, it makes both the character and her interpreter all the more likeable. Interpreter is certainly the operative word here. Mike’s reverence for Neil Diamond causes him qualms about impersonating the man. Claire puts his mind at rest by telling Mike he wouldn’t ‘be an impersonator but an interpreter’, and that’s what Hudson’s Claire comes across as when she sings ‘Walkin’ After Midnight’ at the Wisconsin State Fair. The story dictates there won’t be many more Patsy Cline numbers in the course of the film: the only other is ‘Sweet Dreams’, and that’s an abbreviated fantasy in the mind of drugs-addled Claire in the aftermath of her life-changing injuries. The Neil Diamond songs are nice enough, but Kate Hudson’s performance is so enjoyable, I’m rather sorry the whole film isn’t about a solo Patsy Cline tributary.
9 January 2026
