One of the great moments of cinema 2026 has arrived on the year\u2019s very first day. It features Kate Hudson belting out the climactic chorus of Neil Diamond\u2019s Holly Holy (\u201cHolly holy dream, dream \u2019bout only you!\u201d) in a Milwaukee Thai restaurant while playing an opioid-addicted amputee and former Patsy Cline impersonator from the mid-1990s called Claire Sardina. Hudson\u2019s Claire sings the lyrics ecstatically, like a psalm of hope for an immiserated soul. And this isn\u2019t even the film\u2019s climax. It\u2019s just one of the many mini-marvels of tear-jerking aplomb that are detonated throughout and epitomise a project that is utterly sui generis \u2014 part cheese, part camp, part psychodrama but all heart.<\/p>\n
Earlier in the movie there is another standout moment when Claire\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s a beautifully succinct illustration of character, class and historical era in a single narrative bite.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s all true-ish, culled from the real-life story of Mike and Claire\u2019s popular Diamond tribute act, Lightning & Thunder, and the many bizarre anecdotes that swirl around it. To name them is to spoil them, but it\u2019s enough to know that Mike and Claire meet at the Wisconsin State Fair, hatch a plan to become the country\u2019s greatest Diamond-ites, and only some vehicular injuries, several near-death experiences and substantial drug-induced psychoses will stand in their way.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s 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\u2019 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.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s also a polemic about the allure of celebrity and of fame, and the fantasies of superstardom that infect people on society\u2019s margins. It\u2019s telling, for instance, that Mike\u2019s journey begins, very literally, in a dirty toilet (he\u2019s changing into costume at the fair).<\/p>\n