People take it for granted that the political media and the entertainment industry have an overwhelming liberal bias. The few conservative movie stars are perhaps most known today simply for being conservative: Mel Gibson, Jon Voigt, Sylvester Stallone, James Woods. Others on the right in Hollywood lay low, like Kurt Russell and daughter Kate Hudson, who’ve made various comments that were never scrutinized or followed up on by the media (or increasingly incoherent and insane leftists). Evidently they support Israel, therefore they “deserve to die”? It’s nutty.
Even nuttier: why aren’t there more movies that take place in the 1990s? I could go the rest of my life without seeing another 1950s or 1980s period piece. Doesn’t anyone have anything to say about the 1990s or the 2000s? There was a significant 1970s revival in the 1990s, which petered out early in the new millennium.
But not before I was first exposed to Neil Diamond in 2001’s Saving Silverman. An otherwise typical sex comedy of the time, its male leads (Jason Biggs, Steve Zahn, Jack Black) are obsessed with Diamond, who makes a cameo at the end, driving the trio in a truck, allowing him to make an especially painful pun as he approaches “America Ave”: “We’re coming to America!” Diamond wasn’t thrilled about participating in Saving Silverman—"I was dragged into this project kicking and screaming”—and I’m sure he wasn’t happy to learn that he was the second choice after Paul Simon turned the role down.
Craig Brewer’s Song Sung Blue brings Diamond back to American cinema without jokes or winks. Unlike recent irony-free musician biopics two decades out of date (A Complete Unknown, Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere), Song Sung Blue takes place in the real world, heavy but not self serious or self righteous. Song Sung Blue is a film that doesn't question persistence, hard work, and passion; it's about, as Brewer says, "magical people," artists continuing to create despite working in obscurity. Hugh Jackman plays Mike Sardina, introduced at the start in close-up, giving what looks like a pre-show mirror pep talk that turns out to be an intro in Alcoholics Anonymous. Mike’s been sober for 20 years by the time he meets Claire (Kate Hudson) at the state fair; he knows he’s “not gonna be famous, I’m not gonna be a rock star, but I want to entertain people.” He covers Neil Diamond and The Monkees in neighborhood bars, while she’s going steady doing Patsy Cline along with a coterie of other small town tribute artists.
This is the early/mid-1990s, when the alternative rock revolution briefly allowed a level of transgression, subversion, and aesthetic expansion not seen since in American pop culture; just as a band as gonzo and confrontational as The Frogs could be plucked out of obscurity to open for The Smashing Pumpkins and Pearl Jam, so too could the Sardinas’ Lightning & Thunder get to open for… Pearl Jam. (The Frogs and Lightning & Thunder are both from Milwaukee—what’s in the cheese?) They don’t get signed to Geffen, nor do they ever go on tour; lacking in health more than ambition, Mike has bad knees, a bad back, and a bad heart. Claire inexplicably gets hit by a car while standing in her garden, and while she survives, her leg is mangled and the medication she’s taking induces hallucinations. Forget touring—by the end, Mike is hiding a heart attack and a bad bang on the head with some Super-Glu, just so he can meet Neil Diamond at the local arena.
All of this is painfully real and, despite taking place in the mid-1990s, contemporary. Song Sung Blue isn’t an ideological or political film, but because it takes place in a white Midwestern working class milieu—with zero concessions to diversity quotas or political correctness—it’s a de facto right-wing film. There is no diversity casting, and when the Sardinas’ daughter Rachel (Ella Anderson, recalling a young Amy Madigan in Twice in a Lifetime) tells her father that she’s pregnant, she assures him that she’s already contacted adoption agencies. We see her deliver her baby, mom by her side. Abortion’s never mentioned.
It’s a patriotic film, proud of our country and its people who “don’t want to be impersonators;” if you ask Mike, he’ll say he’s a “Neil Diamond interpreter.” Armond White is one of the few critics to give Song Sung Blue more than a perfunctory notice, calling it “miraculous” in a recent review. “Diamond’s songs celebrate universal emotions (such as the pop devotional “I’m a Believer”)… Diamond’s genius—yes, call it that—isn’t mere nostalgia. Brewer shows everyday America through a song as commonplace as Diamond’s “Forever in Blue Jeans” (a working-class celebration that Brewer aces in a montage showing the jealousy of Rachel’s boyfriend over the auto-mechanic skills that Mike taught her). Song Sung Blue reminds us that pop music—and movies—can be salvific.”
I wouldn’t call Neil Diamond “brilliant,” but White’s assessment of the under-discussed Brewer is right: “Brewer has become our only deft craftsman of the underclass, a filmmaker who respects its culture, homespun virtues, and recognizable, spiritual aspirations. His debut film was the auspicious Southern hip-hop myth Hustle & Flow. Diamond’s gemütlichkeit lyrics inform Brewer’s empathy for all-American strivers like the Sardinas.”
Song Sung Blue is a remarkably well-made movie out of time, a postcard from an alternate universe when production pipelines weren’t disrupted by digital, strikes, streaming, and the pandemic, with stellar cinematography by Amy Vincent, working in an unobtrusive style but delivering the kind of lighting and glamor that photochemical production and projection used to imbue into every movie. That the film will be ignored by the Oscars, and most young moviegoers, is indicative of the bias against white people and white lives. Without fanfare, the Sardinas celebrate and embody “rugged individualism,” continuing to work and perform even after their many health disasters and professional setbacks. After Claire’s accident, she wakes up one morning and tells her husband: “I don’t care if I got hit by a car! I want to sing again! I want to be Thunder!” She doesn’t spend the rest of her life locked at home, living on welfare—she lives to work, to perform, to entertain.
There are people who’d call the Sardinas "privileged." These are vampires, sucking the life out of everyone with any kind of energy. Song Sung Blue is as about as far from “the warmth of collectivism” as you can get.
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter: @NickyOtisSmith