One of the great moments of cinema 2026 has arrived on the year’s very first day. It features Kate Hudson belting out the climactic chorus of Neil Diamond’s Holly Holy (“Holly holy dream, dream ’bout only you!”) in a Milwaukee Thai restaurant while playing an opioid-addicted amputee and former Patsy Cline impersonator from the mid-1990s called Claire Sardina. Hudson’s Claire sings the lyrics ecstatically, like a psalm of hope for an immiserated soul. And this isn’t even the film’s climax. It’s just one of the many mini-marvels of tear-jerking aplomb that are detonated throughout and epitomise a project that is utterly sui generis — part cheese, part camp, part psychodrama but all heart.

Earlier in the movie there is another standout moment when Claire’s husband, Mike (Hugh Jackman), an impoverished Neil Diamond impersonator and recovering alcoholic, suffers a heart attack while trying to start a hand-cranked lawn mower. Mike, a stark representative of Wisconsin’s underclass, is so broke that he cannot afford expensive American healthcare and so, with extraordinary endurance, perseveres through the pain and finishes the mowing. It’s a beautifully succinct illustration of character, class and historical era in a single narrative bite.

It’s all true-ish, culled from the real-life story of Mike and Claire’s popular Diamond tribute act, Lightning & Thunder, and the many bizarre anecdotes that swirl around it. To name them is to spoil them, but it’s enough to know that Mike and Claire meet at the Wisconsin State Fair, hatch a plan to become the country’s greatest Diamond-ites, and only some vehicular injuries, several near-death experiences and substantial drug-induced psychoses will stand in their way.

The material was previously featured in a whimsical 2008 documentary also called Song Sung Blue. But here the director and writer Craig Brewer (Hustle & Flow) finds something more mythic in the tale, and more angry. There is an ominous sense of fate as the couple’s life becomes a strange countdown towards tragedy. Here Brewer borrows a repeated motif from the documentary, that of a passenger plane flying over the Sardinas’ small suburban home. In the doc it describes their ill-favoured location, directly beneath a flight path, but in the movie each flight is the eerie beat of a dreadful timer.

It’s also a polemic about the allure of celebrity and of fame, and the fantasies of superstardom that infect people on society’s margins. It’s telling, for instance, that Mike’s journey begins, very literally, in a dirty toilet (he’s changing into costume at the fair).

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The casting is ingenious. Jackman and Hudson are two performers with muscular singing voices and lightweight charisma, but both have sometimes seemed uneasy, even uncomfortable, when attempting straight roles. Hudson especially has been trapped in a straightjacket of “Kate Hudson types”, while Jackman is emotionally affecting when singing (surely he peaked as Jean Valjean in Les Misérables). Dropping these two into a movie that’s shaped by the straight-faced sentimentality of Neil Diamond proves liberating. Jackman’s tendency towards camp is hidden by glitzy outfits and silly stylings of his stage persona, while Hudson is positively unleashed by the demands that Claire places upon her. She has been quite rightly nominated for a Golden Globe for her performance, and is a credible best actress Oscar contender.
★★★★☆
12A, 132min
In cinemas from Jan 1

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