A quiet, conventional film with a surprisingly firm grip, writer/director Scott Cobb's Crazy Heart will choke you up the same way it kept you hanging in over its shaggy, two-hour shuffle: effortlessly. Much of the credit for its appeal goes to the performance of the congenitally appealing Jeff Bridges as a fading country singer/songwriter known as Bad Blake. If the character of a dissolute, downtrodden quasi-celebrity is a rite of passage for leading men of a certain age (Mickey Rourke picked up the baton last year), Bridges acknowledges the inevitability and exceeds expectations with his typically self-effacing grace. The result is a performance that makes the hackneyed feel new, natural, and almost private; it has a lived-in ease that puts an audience only too familiar with the film's trajectory (and perhaps primed to count off the clichés) on notice and off-guard.
- 12/16/2009
- Movieline
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