Neither rhyme nor reason: "Country Strong"

Your cynicism kicks in early with Country Strong. Some enterprising indie type makes a sincere character drama about the life of a washed-up country singer that hits big with critics, audiences and award committees alike (Crazy Heart), and the studios scurry to semi-remake it as an inflated, Star is Born-ish melodrama in the hope of tapping the same market. Instead of one singer, Shana Feste's film offers a whole stable of 'em, each one conveniently at a different stage in their careers. There's Kelly, a major star struggling with alcohol dependency and a failing marriage, yet still looking as apple-pie wholesome as Gwyneth Paltrow usually does; there's the up-and-coming male contender (Garrett Hedlund, mostly stubble under a stetson), who's something of a flyweight when set against the Colin Farrell role in the earlier movie; and, finally, there's a bright-eyed ingenue (Leighton Meester) working her way up from the very bottom of the ladder.

What distinguished Crazy Heart - aside from Bridges' performance, which was presumably all the studio chiefs noticed going from awards bash to awards bash - was its acute sense of place, and of the sidelines in particular: the nondescript lay-bys and motel parking lots inhabited by a guy who's been on the road too long to no great end. Country Strong, by contrast, unfolds around a series of anonymous, well-lit Nashville venues, where there's always a screaming-swaying crowd on hand in attendance, and it instantly becomes much less interesting for making its lead a glossy-glamorous success story whose only real problem is that she has too much of everything: a hunky manager-husband (actual country star Tim McGraw, his glowering presence slightly undermined by the suspicion he's here - as he was in The Blind Side - to draw in a particular crowd), a hunky beau so hunky he's actually called Beau, enough money to have easy access to pharmaceuticals whenever life gets tough.

Paltrow's best moments come while playing the star: charming autograph hunters, giving one of those ad hoc speeches performers often make onstage when trying to reconnect with their audience in the wake of a PR disaster, communing with a sick kid as part of a Make-a-Wish engagement. The final half-hour, a record of Kelly's live act that features no less than sixteen potential climaxes, is shameless star-pandering, its eyes, claws and teeth set insistently on securing Best Actress nominations. Everybody does their own singing, which would feel more of a plus point if the songs were any more enduring than an own-brand whisky buzz. (As it is, one of the most prominent numbers, the Meester-Hedlund composition "Give In To Me", sounds very much like a plea entered by the filmmakers on behalf of their flimsy material.)

Or, indeed, if there seemed to be any credible progression going on within or around them. Beau goes from rehab nurse to pocket-sized Keith Urban within the space of two tracks. After drying up before a small bar crowd, Meester's Chiles is next observed filling a triumphant support slot in front of a good 10,000. (The flouncy, oh-my-Lawding Meester appears to be going for a young Vivien Leigh, when she might be better off settling for being the next Rachel Bilson; her stage presence, certainly, is less Dolly or Tammy than it is Miley Cyrus, with a touch of the Fearne Cottons.) When Kelly and Beau mark a day off touring by hoboing their way onto a speeding cargo train, there's no sense of how they'd have escaped their management (who'd presumably have insurance issues), how they got on there, or indeed how they'd get back from wherever the train is heading. Such tactics make for a pretty - and, to a strange extent, even pretty watchable - picture, but at two hours, there's a lot of it, and much of that far too slick and smooth to be true. There are records by the Swedish band Rednex that are more authentically country. My mum's line dancing class is more authentically country.

Country Strong opens nationwide tomorrow.