Fallin’, Flyin’, & Feelin’ the Message of Crazy Heart

The rusty yarns of Scott Cooper’s Crazy Heart yearn for the rustic truth that burps, curses, and purrs beneath the paved heart of a contested continent. Critics commenting on this award-winning movie appear divided between those that embrace Jeff Bridges’ and Maggie Gyllenhal’s intense execution of the story’s emotional weight and those that dice the premise of the demon inside Bad Blake as he searches for the promise of divine redemption.

Having already seen this popular interpretation of an alt-country sacred story on the big screen in Nashville, having celebrated Jeff Bridges’ earned Oscar with his fans in the mainstream media, I eagerly awaited the DVD release, hoping that the movie’s twangy pathos and primal range of messages would translate to more meaning for a second viewing in the privacy of my Cookeville apartment. For fans of actors like Bridges and Gyllenhal or of roots country musicians, for folks in recovery from addiction needing affirmation, access to Crazy Heart via its stellar soundtrack CD and the subsequent DVD makes for an awesome musical and moral maintenance plan.

Bridges breathes his onscreen brother Bad Blake, a griseled road dog who manages to turn the open byway into a whiskey-infused cul-de-sac of self inflicted misery. A trashy hotel room, cigarettes and scotch, a sloppy gig at a greasy bowling alley, passing out naked next to a stanger and fan who wears too much makeup — this is how an alcoholic guiatar poet transforms his once glamorous lifestyle into a self-made sanitorium for washed-up booze hounds. Imagine an unsung character cut from the worn leather boots of a Kristofferson or Cash forced to miss the fame his peers achieved.

Apparently, the Texas country blues career of Stephen Bruton bears some similarity to Bad Blake; Bruton collaborated with T-Bone Burnett on the soundtrack and coached Jeff Bridges. Some key details were apparently grafted from Bruton’s true tales, like the make of Blake’s car or the comic relief and olfactory grief of Bridges dumping a water bottle used as piss vessel after long drives.

After a career-rejuvenating reconnection with his younger, more successful protege Tommy Sweet (Colin Farrell) at the same time he is falling in love with a single-mom-journalist played by the always inspiring and subtly seductive Maggie Gyllenhal, Bad suddenly wants to be good. But his romantic and songwriting ambitions face a fork in the road, the same impasse that every friend of the devil in the bottle must reckon with or lose it all.

Unimpressed slaggers called this drunken-singer-gets-sober-story a cliche and moved on to other viewing pleasures, but if the so-called predictable aspects of this film’s grit resemble the lives you and your friends have survived, it might persist in permeating your psyche and iPod playlists, joining a long list of Hollywood art that fights the dark arc of the disease of addicition. The songs by Bridges, the classic country tracks, and the stunning hit single “Weary Kind” by Ryan Bingham round out the rugged soundtrack LP.

Somehow, through it all, a divided America gets united by the gospel of Americana, a soul-baring movie and music of a painfully obvious narrative that nonetheless sears the slick future of those baptized by the bleeps of a digitized noise. The future becomes better when informed by the past; the truth survives; an open hearted cinema communes with its audience at the open hearth of a backyard BBQ. –Andrew William Smith, Editor

Crazy Heart was released on DVD on April 20.