Jeff Bridges is a lucky man. “Crazy Heart” caught him in a perfect storm that swept him to the Oscars. The role, his co-star and the story itself wrapped around him in way that doesn’t happen every day. And, Bridges, smart as well as lucky, made the most of it.
Bridges plays Bad Blake, a country-music legend who’s thrown away every good thing in his life. Reduced to playing his music in bowling alleys and bars, he’s usually drunk before his set starts and is out in the alley throwing up before it’s over. In the morning he wakes up in a cheap motel with a woman who looked a lot better when he had a few belts in him. Then Bad stumbles out to his beat up car and does it all over again.
For the role to work, Bad’s life of dissipation needs to feel like a release valve for a ferocious vitality. You have to see the hunger that made him a star and at the same time marvel that he’s still breathing. Bridges has a knack for inhabiting characters that thrive miles away from any moral code. But, with Bad he also exposes the broken edges that make him a prisoner as much as a libertine.
Then one day Bad meets a woman of a different sort. Jean Craddock (Maggie Gyllenhaal) is a reporter who approaches him for an interview. “Where did all those songs come from?” Jean asks. “Life, unfortunately.”
The two hit it off—a plot twist that should stretch credulity considering the age difference (not to mention the sobriety difference). But Gyllenhaal makes it work. She paints Jean as an intelligent woman who leads with her heart. She is worldly enough to know a damaged man when she sees him, generous enough to forgive his failings, but lacking the caution to keep him at arm’s length. Gyllenhaal has a quality—a softness that is at the same time no stranger to a hard life—few actresses can match.
The remarkable chemistry between Bridges and Gyllenhaal allows “Crazy Heart” to play out like one of the country songs it features: a lyrical blend of joy and pain.
Bad’s romance with Jean gives him another shot at life but it shimmers around the edges like a mirage. The self-destructive impulses that Bad has indulged his whole life are stuffed below the surface and the film’s tension builds around when and how they will erupt.
But Bad is a stubborn man and he sets himself to remake his life piece by piece. Director Scott Cooper creates some great scenes around Bad’s re-entry into the country music mainstream. He shows up at a concert to open for Tommy Sweet (Colin Farrell), a mega-star who used to open for him. As Bad pulls into the parking lot in his old Suburban he is dwarfed in the shadows of Tommy’s fleet of semis and tour buses. You know this appearance is going to tear a scab off his pride.
Farrell is good in this role but Bridges does him one better. He has great stage presence as singer (his argument with a sound engineer is one of the better scenes in the film) and it’s easy to get comfortable with the idea of him being a star.
The stumble that finally undoes Bad is remarkably small but the consequences shake apart his newfound life. The reality of who they are begins to intrude on this fragile romance where Bad and Jean have found shelter. The beauty of “Crazy Heart” is that it doesn’t shy away from the fact that they were always playing against long odds.
“I knew what the risks were with you,” says Jean, “and I took them.”

Directed by Scott Cooper
Rated R
(Four Stars) ****