Craig Brewer’s true story of a Milwaukee couple and their Neil Diamond tribute act is warmer and sadder than its wigs suggest. Jackman and Hudson sing it honestly; the script keeps piling on misfortune until we found we had stopped feeling each blow.
Mike Sardina has a voice, a wig and a conviction that Milwaukee is short of Neil Diamond. He is not wrong about the voice. Craig Brewer’s film, which he wrote and directed from a true story, follows Mike (Hugh Jackman) as he talks Claire Sardina (Kate Hudson), a singer he meets on the same bar circuit, into a two-person tribute act, and then follows the act through weddings, festivals and a run of bad luck that would flatten most marriages. It is warm, it is honestly sung, and it is about twenty minutes and three misfortunes too long. We liked it, with reservations that grew as it went on.
The gigs are the good part. Jackman gets Diamond’s low, chesty delivery and the arm flung out towards the back of the bar, and he does not play it for laughs; Mike believes the songs mean what they say, and Jackman lets him. Hudson takes the harmonies and the patter between numbers, and the two of them sound like people who rehearse in a garage rather than a studio. Scott Bomar keeps the band sounding like a bar band, not a session, which is right. Amy Vincent shoots the stages warm and the Milwaukee streets cold, so that the sequins look like the only bright thing in the state. Ernesto Martinez’s costumes are a size off in the right direction: this is glamour out of a catalogue, altered at home.
Hudson is the reason to go. She plays Claire as a woman who has done the arithmetic on her life, knows the answer and has decided to sing anyway, and she gives the character a dry, practical kindness that keeps Mike’s dreaming on the ground. There is no vanity in it; the wig is bad and she lets it be bad. When she sings alone, it moved us more than we had bargained for. We had come braced for a karaoke joke and got a woman using somebody else’s song to say what she could not say plainly to the man beside her. That is what a tribute act is for, and the film knows it.
Then the second half takes a turn we will not describe, and the film changes key. To Brewer’s credit he does not milk the worst of it; the camera looks away where a lesser film would move in, and he lets the band keep playing rather than stopping for a speech. The trouble is what comes after. The script arrives with fresh misfortune every twenty minutes or so, each announced by a swell in Bomar’s score, and by the last half hour we found we had stopped flinching, which is not what the film wants. Billy Fox cuts the gig montages briskly and the kitchen and hospital scenes slowly, and the balance is wrong. At 133 minutes there is a tighter film in here.
Michael Imperioli lends Mark Shurilla a wised-up Milwaukee patience, and Fisher Stevens brings a doctor’s briskness to Dr Dave Watson. Jim Belushi turns up as Tom D’Amato and is Jim Belushi. Ella Anderson, as Rachel, who watches the whole enterprise from the sidelines, is the film’s quiet find: she does most of her acting by deciding when not to leave. John Beckwith appears as Eddie Vedder, for reasons we will let the film explain, and the stretch around him is the one that had us grinning.
Brewer has been here before. Hustle & Flow (2005) was about a Memphis man making a record on borrowed equipment; Dolemite Is My Name (2019) was about a comic building a career on a character he had not invented. Both knew their heroes were also hustlers, and were sharper for it. Mike and Claire are only ever decent, and their troubles come from outside, from fate, rather than from anything they do. Two hours and a quarter of decent people being knocked down is a lot to watch without a shadow of their own making.
Go for the songs and for Hudson, and go with someone who will not mind you singing on the way home. It carries a 12A and it would be a better film at 110 minutes. Bring tissues; you may find, as we did, that you run short of patience before the film runs short of grief.
