Crazy Heart - STEPHEN SANSOM

Since I was about sixteen years old, I've had an ongoing, rigged list of 'male movie characters that I intend to emulate.' The list is decidedly un-prejudiced toward a character's moral universe - James Bond is on the list. But others include both Wayne and Garth, Indiana, Sherlock, and at the vigorous age of twenty, I added The Dude. Ever since, Jeff Bridges has held a special, nirvana-esque place in my heart as an actor who can somehow convey a flawed yet perfect man (sc. 'dude') unlike any other.

Perhaps it is on account of the similarities between Bridges' character for the Coen brother's and Bad Blake, the washed up drunk of an has been country singer, in Scott Cooper's Crazy Heart that this movie had such an impact on me. They're both independent, have loyal friends, and don't take life seriously. Yet Bad is like Lebowski if The Dude had picked up a guitar, gotten ridiculously famous and wealthy, and then lost it all in a bourbon haze. The Dude is pure, untainted southern California stoner. Bad is a train wreck of four failed marriages, alcoholism, and most egregiously, musical impotency and a misplaced muse.

Crazy Heart is a film about a musician. But it is also a film about music, with scenes devoted to Bad with his guitar, including several three to five minutes of blissful Willie-country live performance. Music is beautiful, transcendent, but is also ugly and regretfully ephemeral. Bad hasn't written a new song in three years, and just like that silence when a guitar string stops its vibrating, Bad is on the verge of disappearing into sonic nothingness. It is only when he meets Jean (played my one of my top five, no, top three, the helplessly lubricious Maggie Gyllenhaal) that he begins writing again. She brings a vision of permanence into his life: she as a kid, a painful marriage in her past, and a life in Santa Fe. With this permanence comes the image of a 'self' he can call his own. He begins writing, falling love with her and her son, tying up loose ends of past marriages, and things begin looking up.

Anyone who watches this film will be struck by its reality. There are no flashbacks to fill in the painful blanks of the past. And there shouldn't be. Like live music, we are the sounds that surround us: the guitars, laughter, chatter, clinking of bottles - we are the people who experience the show with us: the young, old, happy, sad. The meaning of the show, the memories that stick with us, are created in the moment. Crazy Heart records this moment with striking clairity. And just like I will always return to Highway 61 Revisited andThe Golden Band to relive those musical moments, I'll think of this movie of music, pain, and hope as a gem in Jeff Bridges crown, worn begrudgingly by an actor who has never sought the life-altering Bad Blake limelight. I hope you'll dig it too.

This blog post is dedicated to the dedicated Kyle, whose encouragement got me to sit down and just write.