On demand: "Song Sung Blue"

We've arrived at the point where one of Hollywood's most pressing creative concerns, going into the year of Our Lord 2026, was paying tribute to a real-life Neil Diamond tribute act and thereby engineering a Neil Diamond jukebox musical: Song Sung Blue is one for the teenagers, and two for the show. Hugh Jackman toplines as the somewhat improbably named Mike Sardina, a jobbing musician and recovering alcoholic eking out a measly living on Milwaukee's chicken-in-a-basket circuit at the turn of the 1990s. Backstage at one such gig, he crosses paths with a Patsy Cline tribute act, Claire Stingl (Kate Hudson); the pair click, fall for one another, and re-emerge on the circuit as Lightning and Thunder, belting out "Cracklin' Rosie", "Forever in Blue Jeans" and other such standards. Despite Mike's understandable reluctance to perform "Sweet Caroline" (the most overplayed song in Christendom, an anthem for sheep, baa baa baa), the duo start to get somewhere before fate intervenes, and we realise this must have been one of those long-gestating projects afforded a leg-up by the success of 2018's A Star is Born redo: the folks putting the show on here aren't the fresh faces you'd find in Glee or any other bandcamp, rather midlifers with baggage beyond the remit of any roadie (addiction issues, depression, a family at home to raise). It's a vision of showbiz as last-chance saloon, serving until late.

Writer-director Craig Brewer, who oversaw the rap game melodrama Hustle & Flow in another life, duly sets about soliciting texture and experience: the film's backdrop is an unfussy, lived-in, come-as-you-are blue-collar America, and even as the narrative wades into sticky, TVM-adjacent territory in its second half, a distinctive editing strategy makes unusual bedfellows of unlikely developments in the Sardina household. That's one selling point: between senile motorists and Mike's dodgy ticker, the arc is never as predictable as you might think. (The wrinkles of life haven't been entirely smoothed out of it.) And it's fun in a broad-brush kind of way. Brewer evidently prefers performers who can come on and give a longish film some necessary oomph here and there: Michael Imperioli as a silver-fox Buddy Holly impersonator, Fisher Stevens as Mike's dentist manager, Jim Belushi as a phlegmy local entrepreneur. We also get an oddly miscast Eddie Vedder when this story takes a sharp leftfield turn (and the actor in question is actually supposed to be playing Eddie Vedder, not an Eddie Vedder tribute act), but elsewhere Brewer clears ample space for Jackman (wearing the sideburns well, which is to say unironically) and Hudson (who seems to be turning into Janice Long) to be as impressive offstage as they are on. You buy this pair as a double act, which is crucial; they're like an unpretentious Aldi own-brand variant of Joaquin and Reese as Johnny and June. What's around them is often cheesy and corny, caught singing an at least semi-familiar tune; we are, ultimately, many miles from the cinematic cutting edge, and at least three decades removed from where the rest of the American cinema is at in 2026. But that's part of Song Sung Blue's plaid-covered charm: not unlike the real Diamond's secular hymns, Brewer's film has a way of bypassing your most critical faculties. Stick it on, and it kinda works.

Song Sung Blue is now available to rent via Prime Video and YouTube, and on DVD and Blu-ray via Universal.