“Song Sung Blue” – Songs Sung True

The “Neil Diamond zone” is a strange place to be.  There are those so devoted that they regard the iconic singer/songwriter with near-Messianic adoration.  Some find many of his songs pretty cool, but refrain from untethered worship.  Still others think, as one ill-humored character in the new movie Song Sung Blue bluntly announces, “Neil Diamond sucks.”

All of which leads to a most engaging music-centric drama.

Mike Sardina was an auto mechanic, musician, and a recovering alcoholic.  Claire Sardina was a woman with a cosmetology degree and a high-voltage voice.  Together, this husband-and-wife duo united in the 1990s-era Neil Diamond tribute act “Lightning and Thunder”, the toast of Milwaukee, Wisconsin.  Or, as Claire suggests in the biographical Song Sung Blue, a performance that’s not a Neil Diamond impersonation, but rather, an “interpretation.”

Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson each touch award-winning caliber in their respective lead roles.  Hudson, in particular, shines in a brilliant turn that demands both uncommon versatility and committed conviction.

The Sardina’s real-life story plays like a fantastic fable.  And the filmmakers readily reveal that some of what we are seeing has been “fictionalized for dramatic purposes.”  Still, what actually did happen in the lives of these two people is typically the stuff of wildly vivid imagination.

As we join the journey of the Sardina family, we experience a sweeping spectrum of human emotion. Singing for others for the fun of it.  The joy of excelling at something that genuinely matters to you. Unanticipated idolization.  The soul-crushing devastation of tragedy. Macabre coincidence. Mental incapacitation.  Teenage pregnancy.  Paralyzing poverty.

These are all touch points in this engaging story.

Wonderfully woven through it all are the tuneful treasures of one of the most prolific hit makers of our time.

If there be a message, it is this.  Early in life, we all have dreams of how it will be.  And yet, as a woman sullenly concedes in an Alcoholics Anonymous group of which Mike is a member, most of us find that those youthful dreams remain unrealized.

If nothing else, Song Sung Blue serves as reinforcement that the magic inherent in music is an undying beacon of hope.  In short, the film implores us to embrace one of Diamond’s most universal declarations: “I am… I said.”

Song Sung Blue is available to rent or buy on Amazon Prime Video.

-John Smistad

Fair use image of Song Sung Blue