The dream of Song Sung Blue |
The year is young, but you are not likely to encounter in 2026 at the cinema two people who love life more than Mike Sardina and Claire Stingl in the wonderfully entertaining new movie Song Sung Blue.
Mike, played by a rangy, companionable Hugh Jackman, is a striving singer in Milwaukee who has battled the bottle, cannot consistently pay his mortgage, and keeps himself going by appearing at the state fair dressed up to look (and sound) like Don Ho. Claire, meanwhile, is a single mother nursing her own dream of supporting herself with her voice, but she, too, pays the bills by impersonating a formerly famous star (Patsy Cline) and, in her case, by doing some hairdressing on the side. “I just want to sing and be happy and feel loved,” says Claire, who is played by Kate Hudson in a career-shifting role that finally liberates her from deathly dull romcoms and revives the spunky spirit that charmed audiences a quarter-century ago in Almost Famous (2000).
But it’s not just the charisma of Jackman and Hudson alone that makes this movie sing: it’s Mike and Claire — real people who were the subject of a documentary in 2008, also called Song Sung Blue. Both the film and the earlier documentary charted Mike and Claire becoming a couple, matrimonially and musically. Pooling their resources, they performed as Lightning & Thunder, ostensibly a Neil Diamond tribute act, but realized with such conviction and flair that it transcended its parasitic origins. Mike died in 2006.
Writer-director Craig Brewer resists the temptation to make Mike and Claire in any way pitiful or worthy of derision. To the contrary, though the film is frequently funny, Brewer takes their ambitions and reversals seriously. For example, the film opens with an unforgiving close-up of........