BAD Blake at the age of 57 is a broke and falling apart country music legend, the veteran of four marriages and non-stop dissipation now reduced to playing in bowling alley bars. And yet, Bad can’t help but reach for salvation with the help of Jean, a journalist who discovers the real man behind the musician. As he struggles down the road of redemption, Bad learns just how tough life can be on one man’s crazy heart.
Review
CRAZY Heart is blessed with so many marvelous moments, lovely lines and vivid characters.
Bad was once a star—“I used to be somebody,” he sings, “now I am somebody else”—and Jeff Bridges fills his emptiness with quirky humor, dangerous anger, an urgent yearning for redemption and a gift for evoking a better time in a voice that’s plenty good enough for this one. It’s a performance on a scale with the West’s wide-open spaces.
Joe Morgenstern, Wall Street Journal
EVERY detail of Jeff Bridges’ performance in Crazy Heart is so delicious you want to sop it up with buttermilk biscuits: the counterintuitive line readings, the throwaway bits of business, the way he walks and smokes and drinks and flirts and sings. In Bridges’ hands, the down-and-out country music star Bad Blake becomes a kind of guitar-playing Falstaff, his pathos inseparable from his humor and his weakness inseparable from his strength.
A few of the songs get played several times over the course of the film, and with each performance they accrue new meaning. It’s rare for the music in a film about musicians to advance the narrative in this way—another of the textural details that makes this apparently simple tale of addiction, love, and the possibility of redemption feel so unusual, and so true.
Dana Stevens, Slate.com
COOPER, himself an actor and musician with an eye for authenticity, has given Bridges the opportunity to deliver an all-out performance, playing someone who can be disgruntled and despairing, resentful and delightful and everything in between.
