It’s not the holiday season unless we have some kind of movie musical gracing our screens. Last year, we had Timothée Chalamet’s take on Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown; in 2023, we had Chalamet as Wonka; in 2022, we had the Whitney Houston music biopic; in 2021, we had West Side Story — you get the gist. This year, we have something we’ve never seen before: not an adaptation of preexisting IP (like Wonka or West Side Story) nor a musician biopic (like A Complete Unknown or I Wanna Dance With Somebody), but a feature-film adaptation of a documentary about a husband-and-wife duo named Lightning and Thunder who sang Neil Diamond songs in Milwaukee. Both films are called Song Sung Blue, but only one of them is directed by Dolemite Is My Name and Hustle & Flow filmmaker Craig Brewer starring Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson in elaborate wigs and even more elaborate Wisconsin accents. Jackman’s musical bona fides are well-established by now, and Hudson had one of this year’s most unexpectedly solid debut albums. Together, they could be unstoppable.
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It’s not so much that Jackman is playing a “Neil Diamond impersonator,” Hudson’s character reminds him, but in fact a “Neil Diamond interpreter.” That said, it mostly seems like he’s “interpreting” beloved Diamond songs by singing them more or less exactly how they sound when Diamond sings them. It’s easy to laugh about a feel-good movie musical starring Jackman now, but lest we forget how much money The Greatest Showman made several Christmases ago. This thing — if you can remember the order the words of the title go in — could be huge. Michael Imperioli, Jim Belushi, and King Princess (congrats on the new album) fill out the supporting cast. If there’s anyone to place bets on when it comes to “Wisconsin accent accuracy,” my money’s on Belushi.
