The first thing you need to understand is that Crazy Heart is not a “music movie.” It is an “alcoholism movie.” Everything revolves around Bad Blake’s alcoholism. The music is completely incidental – you could substitute almost any career and basically the entire story would translate pretty seamlessly. Try doing that with a real music movie like Music & Lyrics, or That’s the Way of the World, or Hustle & Flow.

Don’t expect any great scenes of songs being written. Don’t expect any talk about music gear, or scenes of songs being recorded in the studio. Don’t expect any great dialog about music or artistic creation (example: Maggie Gyllenhaal asks “where do all these songs come from?” Bad Blake’s answer: “Life.” It gets no deeper than that.) Don’t even expect any good concert scenes, because they are pretty uninspiring and the music is really mediocre.

What you CAN expect are endless, disgusting scenes of Jeff Bridges walking around with his pants undone, acting completely and utterly revolting. He is so disgusting it is incomprehensible that Maggie Gyllenhaal’s character would fall in love with him, or ever touch him with a ten-foot poll. The man is not clean. He smells bad. He’s so drunk he can’t walk straight. His body is visibly rotting right on his bones. His skin is disgusting. He walks around with his belly hanging out. He goes on stage with fresh puke all over his shirt. Let me tell ya, I’d be sittin’ on warm maple syrup if I was Maggie Gyllenhaal watching all this! And don’t think for a second that she falls for him because he is interesting. He’s not. He has nothing to say about music, his career, his life. Nothing. All he does is drink. At best he spouts corn-ball lines like “I never noticed what a dump this room is until you walked into it” (which can of course be interpreted two different ways.)

Even as an alcoholism movie, it fails. I suppose it captures the ravages of this terrible disease pretty well, but I never made any kind of emotional connection to any of the characters in the movie. Basically, you just sit there waiting for the movie to end.

The only bright spot is that Colin Farrell gives a really nice little supporting performance as Tommy Sweet, the young country star that Bad Blake supposedly “taught everything.” Colin Farrell is interesting as an actor because he has very few tics – I barely recognized him in this role. I’m starting to suspect that he is a pretty fine actor.

As my wife and I left the theater after watching Crazy Heart, we walked past signage advertising the films that are coming to the theater soon. They were The Bounty Hunter, Clash of the Titans, and a Miley Cyrus movie.  This is why Crazy Heart is getting so much press: not because it’s a good film, but because films are so incredibly bad now that Crazy Heart is what passes for good or edgy.

Anyway, if you want to watch a made-for-TV movie about alcoholism, Crazy Heart is perfect. Otherwise, do yourself a favor and skip it.