"Song Sung Blue"

  ☆☆☆½ 

Movie screens used to be filled with films like Song Sung Blue, which exist for no reason other than to entertain a large number of people, to give them two hours of simple entertainment grounded in humanity rather than spectacle. Song Sung Blue makes no great demands on viewers; it only wants to please them. The entertainment industry has largely moved on from movies like this, but thankfully writer-director Craig Brewer refuses.

Song Sung Blue is a lot like its central characters, Mike and Claire Sardina, who have a dogged, sincere and almost singular determination to entertain and please audiences, which they do by impersonating popular singers. Claire specializes in Patsy Cline. Mike is sort of an all-purpose pinch-hitter, though as the film begins he's aware he can go too far. The six-foot-something White guy, who's a recovering alcoholic, draws the line at performing "Tiny Bubbles" like Don Ho.

Neil Diamond, though. There's an idea. Pretty soon, Mike is trying ridiculous haircuts, donning sequined shirts, and urging his dentist-slash-manager to get a leaf blower so his hair will move in the wind. These are not unserious people — they are just very serious about rather unserious things.

Song Sung Blue is a simple, quirky slice-of-life comedy, and it's filled with songs by Neil Diamond, one of those singers you might think you don't know until you start humming along to all the songs.

Hugh Jackman plays Mike. It's long-since established that Jackman is a consummate performer with a strong, clear singing voice, and he uses every trick he has to make his character come to life. It helps that the movie is based on a documentary about the real-life Mike Sardina, who really did form a Neil Diamond cover band called Lightning and Thunder with the woman who became his wife.

That woman is played by Kate Hudson, who has long been hampered by her connections — for many audiences, particularly those who are in the target age demographic for Song Sung Blue, she's been "Goldie Hawn's daughter." She's been strong on screen before, stronger than perhaps most people remember, but Song Sung Blue lets her finally break free. She takes a role that seems simple and one-note and finding stunning dimension.

Though the story is primarily about Mike, who Jackman plays with enormous appeal and heart, Hudson becomes the movie's emotional anchor. Song Sung Blue is built around her ability to sing, to charm, and, ultimately, to descend to some depths that are never even hinted at in the way the movie is positioned.

This is, at one level, a sweet, audience-pleasing comedy, but there is tragedy, and it turns out to be the kind that doesn't feel manufactured or predictable. Director Brewer remains true to both the real-life story that inspired it, and to the realities of the hard-scrabble lives its characters live. They may present themselves as happy and glamorous, but nothing comes to them easily.

The movie's fundamental challenge is that a lot happens to the Sardinas and their family, and Song Sung Blue is pretty overstuffed. From the start, it glosses over the nuance, doesn't spend a lot of time on subtlety, and its determination to fit in everything that happens to Mike and Claire can feel a little underdone. Mike, in particular, proves troubling as a character — a man who is so determined to follow his big dream that he neglects too many of the smaller, more urgent details.

But Brewer always returns to honest emotion, including moments of genuine suspense and earned pathos. With the constant strength of Hudson, whose Oscar nomination this week was both surprising and incredibly well deserved, Song Sung Blue is like a Neil Diamond song: a little schmaltzy, a little predictable, and sometimes even a little embarrassing, but it makes you misty-eyed, it makes you smile and, manipulative as it may be, it gives you no choice but to sing along.

Viewed January 22, 2026

Digital Screener