Crazy Heart

Directed by Scott Cooper

(R)

****

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A down-on-his-luck country singer seeks redemption.

Crazy Heart “gets to you like a country song,” said David Ansen in Newsweek. Jeff Bridges’ washed-up, hard-drinking country singer is a figure we know well from other films. But what writer-director Scott Cooper’s film lacks in originality, it makes up for in authenticity and pure storytelling charm. “It’s the singer, not the song.” The singer here is Bad Blake, a man with an ugly past, said Todd McCarthy in Variety. A bearded, big-bellied Bridges fully inhabits the role, showing a sad self-awareness of how far he’s fallen, while revealing the “inner core of pride hidden behind the fat and dirt,” as well as the love he still has for his craft. Bridges is the heart of Crazy Heart, and Cooper lets him do his thing, said Stephanie Zacharek in Salon.com. He offers his actors “a simple, unadorned landscape” to live in, and, in doing so, allows them to show us where the “cliché of what it means to be a country singer intersects with believable human suffering and pleasure, too.”