“Song Sung Blue” begins with a close up on Mike Sardina’s (Hugh Jackman) face. “I am, I said,” he begins, invoking the Neil Diamond song of the same name. “I am, I cried! An entertainer.”
Jackman, certainly, is just that. Throughout this sequence, the only thing the audience has to go on is Jackman’s face, giving life to Mike’s love for music and, more importantly, love for Diamond. Mike is what you might call a yapper, regaling his unseen audience with stories about how much he loves music. The close-up is effective, drawing you into Mike’s center of gravity until finally, you realize that he’s not actually on stage somewhere, but rather at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting — it’s his sober birthday, and he’s decided to put on a little show for his peers.
Mike (AKA, Lightning), much like Jackman himself, was born to entertain, no matter the size of the audience. He and his wife, Claire (Kate Hudson), performed together as a Neil Diamond tribute band — excuse me, a Neil Diamond tribute experience — called Lightning & Thunder in Wisconsin in the late 1980s and 90s. Written and directed by Craig Brewer, the film is based on a 2008 documentary of the same name.
If you’re thinking to yourself, “What could possibly be so interesting about a Neil Diamond tribute band?” I say, hold onto your butts! Mike and Claire Sardina have lived a life full of twists and turns, the kind filled with events that make you stop and go, “That sounds like a movie!” And yet, the best parts of “Song Sung Blue” have nothing to do with those twists, but instead with the crowd pleasing charm and the musical spectacular of the two performers at the film’s center.
The first half of “Song Sung Blue” is its most conventional, but also its most flat out entertaining. There’s a real hokey, Midwestern charm to the whole endeavor (I don’t know if Hudson is doing a good Wisconsin accent, but she certainly puts a smile on my face), particularly in the moments where Mike and Claire meet and discover their respective love for the work of Neil Diamond. On their first date, Mike goes back to Claire’s house, and they wind up not kissing, or having sex, but singing together. The chemistry is a little strange, but they themselves are a little strange in a very sweet way. There’s a glint in their eyes when they look at each other that only comes when you meet someone that can match your freak — the freak, in this case, being a propensity to stay up all night long singing Neil Diamond songs.
From there, the story unfolds as you might expect. Mike and Claire fall more deeply in love. Their respective children from previous marriages start to get along. Their Neil Diamond experience band starts to come together, and they get a few gigs. The tour de force of this section is a night where Lighting & Thunder get to open for Pearl Jam in Milwaukee (Mike, adorably, has no idea what Pearl Jam is). You might not think that Pearl Jam fans would be particularly inclined towards Neil Diamond, but in this world, when Eddie Vedder (John Beckwith) comes out to join the band during “Forever in Blue Jeans,” musical tastes fall to the wayside as everyone starts singing along.
The second half of “Song Sung Blue,” however, is a little trickier. Here, a devastating event that defines the Sardinas’ life together comes into play, and Brewer has a difficult time managing the abrupt tone shifts. The film speeds through some of its more surprising moments, leaning into the shock value of it all, but not really giving the audience too much time to live in the emotional fallout.
It’s hard to say exactly what I mean without spoiling anything, and I really don’t want to spoil anything — if you don’t know what’s coming, it is a wild ride in the theater, at the very least — but I’ll do my best. At one point, Claire is in the middle of a serious surgery and Mike, who has a heart problem that he’s been downplaying for his family’s sake, takes Claire’s teenage daughter Rachel (Ella Anderson) aside. He tells her he’s having a heart attack, and asks her to shock him with a defibrillator. Anderson is an absolute delight in “Song Sung Blue,” and does a better job than most of the actors at carrying the emotional heft of the film without leaning too maudlin. But this scene is over before you can really digest what’s happening, and even Anderson has a bit of trouble when the film’s pacing fails to deliver on the intensity of the moment.
But, for as much as the pacing of “Song Sung Blue” gets in the way of some of its deeper emotions, there is an earnestness to this film that’s difficult to be cynical about. Mike and Claire are two people who genuinely believe in the healing power of not just music, but Neil Diamond specifically, and by the time you get to the final big show at film’s end, you’re firmly rooted in that belief with them. After all, these are true entertainers, and if nothing else, “Song Sung Blue” creates a stage for them to shine.