Jeff Bridges and Maggie Gyllenhal turn in very nice performances in Crazy Heart, another of so many movies/stories of American lost men on lost roads [Paris, Texas; Don’t Come Knocking; Red Lights, based on a Simenon novel; all the Randolf Scott/Bud Boetticher collaborations – The Tall T, Ride Lonesome] featuring wide open western landscapes that appeal to everybody’s shuck the maddening crowd sensibility. In our fantasies, of course, the deserts, the plains, the tumbleweed, the austere table-top hills retain something cozy about them; we can be alone and then come home. In the real lives of marginal men like Bad Blake, the country musician Bridges portrays, there’s nothing very cozy about it at all. Miles and miles of roads, slender paydays, no where to turn but the bottle creates a life not many would chose if they could see the whole package at the beginning.

Bad Blake at 57 looks 77. He’s at the sorry end of a once promising career, driving to whatever gigs his agent can get him, backed by young hopefuls with guitars and drums in barrooms and bowling allies where the audience is all about his age, living the lives of their remembered youths in the nostalgia of his songs. In Santa Fe Jean (Gylenhall) comes to interview him and (inexplicably) is attracted to him, and he, more explicably, to her. He sourly accepts a big payday to be the warm-up act for his earlier protege, Tommy Sweet who, young and studly, is attracting the crowds and the big dollars. Sweet acknowledges, on stage and personally, his debt to Blake. Coming on the heels of the new affection Blake finds in Jeanie, we see the possibility of self worth returning and a way out of the Blake’s self sought hell. Both Sweet and Blake’s agent keep hammering him for new songs though he claims he’s washed up and they don’t come like they used to. A bad accident, Jean’s devotion, and that of her young son, move Blake back into song writing. An alcohol induced near tragedy with the young boy leads to his separation from Jean and his final turn from alcohol and a modest tale of redemption, not saturated in the Hollywood obvious but real enough…

The music is quite respectable for music-made-for-movies, and the sound track with other familiar country tinged tunes is very nice.

So, does the who package work? Modestly, I’d say.

Somehow the film seems to sag between several of the important scenes. There is a sense of the schematic — that yes, this might happen; yes, I see it — but I don’t feel it. I don’t quite believe. The transition from watching a movie to forgetting we are watching a movie doesn’t happen.

Bridges as a singer is just about perfect. His voice is gravelly and resonant, flirtatious and exhausted. His lyrics and tunes aren’t cliches but are familiar stories from the best of the country-western canon. The make up artists, set designers and most of all Bridges himself give us a visceral, sad portrait of alcoholic ruin; too much of a portrait perhaps. Almost unwatchable. Were we in the room with him we’d turn our heads. We really see a man in the last throes of destruction, from flabby uncared for flesh, to watery eyes, mouth trailing vomit, the bottle being cradled in coma like results.

Gylenhall as Jean is a perky, way cute southwestern woman, who has made some mistakes and is determined to make no more. Her 4 year old, Buddy, is the center of her life. As love blooms she trusts Bad Blake with the child and sets our disaster alarms ringing. And yet, it’s hard to credit the attraction he creates in her, in the space of time devoted to it. She warms to him in two prickly, short interviews he has granted — the second, with the intention of getting into her pants. Somehow he is not charming enough; he is too unkempt, we don’t quite suspend our disbelief. He is not just the standard older male to the standard younger woman; he is A LOT older – a grandfather….ewww! OK, women are more generous with men’s surface appearances than vice-versa but for a woman who claims to have learned from her earlier mistakes she is pretty quick to forget that Blake’s surface is surely bound to his inner and life-long realities. Something more needed to be done to help us agree to this relationship.

There is somewhat the same problem between Blake and Sweet. The key scene in which Sweet acknowledges his debt to Blake is, as the falling in love scene with Janie, too schematic. It is a well developed sketch for the scene that was needed. They needed a fight in the parking lot gravel or something to help us with the contradictions, tensions, guilt, anger. Oh, and the agent, as an LA not-quite-a-creep was rotely written and rotely acted. Agents get a percentage of their clients earnings. He couldn’t have been getting much from the low-life bars Blake was singing at. There must have been something more generous at work, some belief in the man, some worry for a friend, that might have added to the relationship. We don’t see him at all as Blake finally surfaces to sobriety and modest success at the end of the film.

It was great to see Robert Duvall appear, someway into the film, playing an ex-alchy, still bar-owner, long time pal of Blake’s. Duvall’s appearance in a movie is just about enough to make me pay for admission [if you’ve never seen Tomorrow, put it on your short list.] But Duvall looked like he was losing a step or two, himself. The longest scene, when he takes Blake out fishing and offers “sage” advice has the same schematic feel as other parts of the film. Yes. Maybe. But not quite. Blake does not follow up on the advice and Duvall sort of disappears.

I’m not with the Rotten Tomatoes reviewers who universally appreciate it. The SF Chronicle’s Little Man just about gets it for me: sitting up in the chair applauding. Though in my case, not long and not hard. It’s a good film in parts; a good film for collectors of on-the-road movies; a good film for country-western genre songs. I wouldn’t wait for it to appear on TV but I might not take a a first date to it, unless already known that wrenching stories, AA redemption and sad songs will be appreciated.

It shouldn’t go without mention that the film is based on a slender novel of the same name by Thomas Cobb. Haven’t read it so no comment, but do if you have.