(Above: Kate Hudson and Hugh Jackman in Song Sung Blue (2025). Photo by Sarah Shatz/Focus Features © 2/Sarah Shatz/Focus Features © 2 – © 2025 Focus Features, LLC. All Rights Reserved.)

By M. Faust 

I was horrified when I first saw a poster for Song Sung Blue: another musical biopic, a la Rocketman and Bohemian Rhapsody? With Hugh Jackman as Neil Diamond, a role certain to bring out the worst in him? Definitely going right to the top of my must-avoid list. 

But there I go jumping to conclusions. The movie could be described as a biopic, but not of a popular musical performer. It is based on the true story of a blue-collar couple who had some success in the Milwaukee area during the 1990s performing as a Neil Diamond cover band. And if you’re looking for a movie to take the whole family to this holiday season, as long as the youngest isn’t too young, it’s probably your best bet. 

Jackman plays Mike Sardina, Vietnam vet, recovering alcoholic and auto mechanic. He is a modestly talented musician who long ago discovered that the best way to get in front of an audience was by playing tribute shows. Under the stage name of Lightning, Mike does a decent Elvis, but so does most everyone else on the circuit. At a show he meets Claire (Kate Hudson), a single mother and beautician who plays keyboards and does a good Patsy Cline. Sparks fly, and they decide that a show of Neil Diamond’s music is the perfect use of their combined talents. Thus is born Thunder and Lightning. 

Fortunately for us, they concentrate on the early years of Diamond’s success as a writer-performer. Obviously they do “Sweet Caroline,” but Mike (and the movie) are insistent that Diamond was so much more than that one song. With few exceptions, all of the songs recreated in the movie were hits between 1969 and 1972: “Soolaimon,” “Holly Holy,” “Brother Love’s Travelling Salvation Show,” “Cracklin Rosie,” “Crunchy Granola Suite” and the title song, showstoppers all and all performed with nary any hint of an ironic wink. 

Inspired by a 2008 documentary of the same title about the real Mike and Claire Sardina, Song Sung Blue relishes its musical performances but is equally about the difficult and sometimes tragic life these two people led. Incidents that feel like a writer’s attempt to tug at the heartstrings actually happened (a little research indicates that not much in the film is fictionalized). The writer and director is Craig Brewer, whose first success, Hustle and Flow (2004), demonstrated an interest in the lives of everyday people that has largely marked the rest of his career. Jackman is dependably good, but the real surprise is Hudson, who hasn’t had this good a role to play since her Oscar-nominated debut in Almost Famous (2000). 

Thinking about Song Sung Blue and Is This Thing On, with Will Arnett as an office worker who finds relief from the pain of divorce through stand-up comedy (it arrives in local theaters in January) made me realize that I have a soft spot for films that have no assholes, those cardboard bad guys used to evoke sympathy for the main characters. By contrast, Marty Supreme, inspired by the story of 1950s American ping pong champion Marty Reisman, has nothing but assholes. 

It’s another movie by one of the recently separated Safdie Brothers, who made such hyperactive films as Uncut Gems (2019) with Adam Sandler and Good Time (2017) with Robert Pattinson. Working for the first time without brother Benny (whose had his own solo debut with the recent The Smashing Machine), Josh Safdie works in the same style, in which nothing matters more than velocity. Well, maybe one thing: ugliness. There’s not a single person in Marty Supreme who isn’t unpleasant to look at, beginning with star Timothée Chalamet, and that can’t have been easy to do. Nor does there seem to be a single negative cliché about ambitious Jews that Safdie has overlooked, a problem not excused by his (and Chalamet’s) own Jewishness. 

Over two and one half exhausting hours, Chalamet’s Marty Mauser runs roughshod over everybody and everything in his determination to be recognized as the world’s greatest table tennis champion. The events are mostly fictional: Safdie is more interested in mounting abrasive confrontations than he is in establishing a story arc. (After all, it’s a sports movie, so we all know how it’s going to end.) I will admit that the scenes of competition, in which Chalamet seems to be doing his own pinging and ponging, are spectacular, more so than I’ve ever seen in a real match. Chalamet’s performance is committed and energetic, but very one-note. And the story’s endless plot digressions and the apparently willful refusal to provide us any character to sympathize with made the film an excruciatingly tiresome viewing experience. (Don’t take my word for it, though: mine is very much a minority opinion.)