What Are The Critics Saying?
"If Jeff Bridges earns an overdue Oscar for Crazy Heart it won't be for any charitable reasons. It's arguably the best performance of his career. Bridges’ performance as a broken down honky tonk singer might be the actor’s finest hour-plus on screen."
Christian Toto WHAT WOULD TOTO WATCH?
"The movie serves as a showcase for Bridges. Through his body language and demeanor, you can imagine the toll the years of wear and tear have inflicted."
Bob Bloom JOURNAL & COURIER
"A phenomenal, heart-breaking performance from Jeff Bridges powers this simple but affecting redemption story."
Nev Pierce EMPIRE MAGAZINE
"Crazy Heart is a superbly directed, powerfully emotional drama with an unmissable central performance from Jeff Bridges."
Matthew Turner VIEW LONDON
"What distinguishes writer-director Scott Cooper's debut is his storytelling, affecting but never maudlin, and a fearless performance by Bridges."
Rossiter Drake SAN FRANCISCO EXAMINER
"Gyllenhaal is charming and makes unexpected choices in her performance, but this is Bridges' show, and he's as Best Actor-worthy as he's ever been."
Joe Neumaier NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
"Jeff Bridges as Bad Blake truly embodies the phrase Oscar worthy performance. Crazy Heart is great and wonderfully worth seeing, but Jeff Bridges performance in it, is not to be missed."
Giles Hardie SYDNEY MORNING HERALD
"Bridges is terrific in his richest role since The Big Lebowski. But the surprise is Farrell, unexpectedly winning as the successful protégé keen to give his mentor a break.
HEAT MAGAZINE
"Deeply felt performances, great music and pitch-perfect detail make this a film to be cherished."
Erin Free FILMINK
"It is Bad Blake's tortured complexity that sells 'Crazy Heart,' and Jeff Bridges captures Blake body and soul."
Steve Crum VIDEO REVIEWMASTER
"In a musical genre where emotional authenticity is essential, Bridges is a great enough actor to make us believe these songs could be his own."
Liam Lacey GLOBE & MAIL
"Like The Wrestler but with more heart, Crazy Heart delivers brilliant performances from both Bridges and Gyllenhaal."
Kevin McCarthy BDK REVIEWS
"Jeff Bridges' portrayal of broken-down, liquored-up country singer Bad Blake may be the best of his career, and that's saying something."
Bill Goodykoontz ARIZONA REPUBLIC
The Making Of Crazy Heart
Blake: "I'm fifty seven years old and broke!" Manager: "Why don't you sit down and write some songs uh?" Like a sly and tender country song, laced with equal parts passion, humor and trouble, "Crazy Heart" is the portrait of a man who's lived hard, fast and recklessly, but still goes after the salvation of love when he gets what appears to be one last chance to redeem itself. Writer, producer and director Scott Cooper, himself a Southerner steeped in the rollicking legends and bittersweet themes of country music, always saw "Crazy Heart" outsized lead character of Bad Blake as a mirror of the country heroes he grew up idolizing, in spite of their wildly unpredictable love lives and battles with their darker impulses. Bad might indeed have a 'bad' streak, he can be as ornery, irresponsible, intoxicated and ridiculous as they come: but he is equally a gifted storyteller, an unsinkable romantic, a soul in need, and a man who finally proves himself willing to chase after redemption when all seems lost. Cooper was best known as an actor: he appeared in "Get Low" with Robert Duvall, when he first ran into Bad Blake in Thomas Cobb’s novel "Crazy Heart". He had been on the hunt for a raw and realistic country music themed project to write and direct for some time. The book was critically acclaimed, with the New York Times Book Review saying "the milieu is as resonant as a steel guitar and the plot moves along without skipping a beat," and country star Kinky Friedman writing, "The characters are cut cleanly out of America: the roadside West, the dance halls and beer joints, the occasional big concert and the endless, eternal hotel rooms that are as close to home as any country singer ever gets. Bad Blake is a man you will not soon forget." The character certainly carried a kick and abounded with potential, but as he sat down to write, Cooper faced the task of translating Bad Blake’s mix of humor and sorrow into something that would feel resonant and exhilarating on screen, that would come across as funny and honest and that might illuminate in equal parts the sheer exuberance of his musical talent and the tough to escape lure of his demons. In many ways, it came naturally to Cooper. "I grew up with this type of music, living in the same type of world that Bad Blake lives in. And being an actor, I understood the nature of a performance-driven story. I felt like if I couldn’t do this, having grown up in the South, steeped in country rock, working as an actor, I was in trouble," he laughs. Cooper let the character and the rich ironies of his almost-famous, perilously-conducted life guide the way. "What I really wanted to capture was the mixture of humor and pathos in Bad’s life, and inject it with levity," he explained. "Bad is an old dog who doesn’t know if he has any new tricks, a man who will always go through peaks and valleys but his story moves, in spite of that, towards redemption." The urge to change is sparked in Bad by one of the sweetest romances he’s ever encountered and here, too, Cooper wanted to evoke all the real and wild contradictions of relationships the heat and the electricity that make those first moments of love so thrilling and the ways we still can find ourselves doing wrong by those we care about the most no matter how powerful the feelings. When the script was finished, Cooper turned to another Southern actor and filmmaker who has long been a mentor to him: Robert Duvall, who himself won an Oscar ® playing a down and out country singer in Horton Foote’s beloved classic, "Tender Mercies". Duvall’s response changed everything. "When you send a script to Robert Duvall and he says 'Yes', that’s pretty much all that you could ever dream about," muses Cooper.
It was far more than just a relationship that sealed the deal, however. The script’s unerring vision of man trying to follow his untamed, hungry heart and its distinctly Southwestern flavor was right up the alley of Bob Duvall’s production company, Butcher's Run. "Duvall and I have always been drawn to character-driven dramas," Duvall’s Butcher’s Run partner, 2007 Emmy Award winning producer Rob Carliner ("Broken Trail") explained. "But we don’t often find scripts that portray characters as honestly and authentically as "Crazy Heart". It’s a story that will resonate with an awful lot of people because it’s about a true American artist who has issues with women and alcohol but through his love of music, tries to save himself." "There’s a wonderful roughness to it and it really gets to the hard living and a guy fighting with his demons," Duvall muses. "It’s an age-old story in some ways but Scott Cooper looked at it freshly, and with a sense of truth and new dimensions people haven’t seen before." Informant Media producer and 2004 Christopher Award winner, Judy Cairo ("The Brooke Ellison Story") recalls: "This script just jumped out at me because it’s about country music, which is part of my roots, but also because it’s such an earthy, realistic, moving story. Every character in the film is somebody who is completely relatable and distinctly true to the American landscape." While the storytelling of "Crazy Heart" started with the script, it was only the beginning. Bad Blake is all about his music, which is why the songwriting of the film was as central as the storytelling and had to be one hundred percent real and believable as coming from inside the soul and experience of a well loved, if washed-up, country singer. There was no one better to do that than Grammy Award winner T Bone Burnett (O Brother, Where Art Thou?"), who wrote many of Blake’s songs along with the late Stephen Bruton (7/11/1948 - 9/5/2009 who passed away of cancer at the home of boyhood friend Burnett). "We knew that if we were going to take on a movie about a country singer, we had to get the music absolutely right," Rob Carliner ("The Apostle") explained. "That’s why we wound up going to T Bone. Without him, this movie likely wouldn’t have happened and it could never have happened as authentically." It took almost a year for the filmmakers to track down the almost always-engaged Burnett, but when Cooper finally met with him, they hit it off instantly. Burnett came on board not only to write and produce the film’s songs but as a producer. He couldn’t help but be drawn in by the hard truths and raw humor of Bad Blake’s story. "And with Scott Cooper being a musician, having been on the road, and having a good ear, it seemed there was the potential to make a movie that would be authentic to the experience of being a musician." It was Cooper, Burnett says, who convinced him he had to be part of the film. "He made me believe he could make a film that would stand the test of time. He’s very knowledgeable about country music and the South and the whole world these characters inhabit." Bruton, indeed, felt a deep affinity for "Bad", having spent much of his own life on tour buses rambling through roadhouses far from home. "It’s an interesting life," he said before his death. "Nothing but the performance is real. You’re not responsible to anything you did yesterday and it’s great for a while but it can easily become a state of arrested development. At some point, you have to walk through the looking glass." "Bad reminds me of some musicians I have known, but they should remain nameless," Burnett remarked. A big inspiration for both songwriters was Jeff Bridges's unwavering commitment to every nuance of the role.
2004 Donostia Lifetime Achievement Award recipient Jeff Bridges is one of those chameleonesque actors who is perhaps better known for the indelible characters he has played than for his own persona. His memorably naturalistic performances include the charming Texan Duane Jackson in Peter Bogdanovich’s "The Last Picture Show" (garnering his first Oscar® nomination for supporting actor); the irreverent Lightfoot, sidekick to Clint Eastwood’s bank robber in Michael Cimino‘s "Thunderbolt and Lightfoot" (his second Oscar nomination); the computer programmer Kevin Flynn, imprisoned inside a computer in the groundbreaking "Tron"; the alien who crashes to earth in "Starman" (his third Oscar nomination and first for best actor); the lounge pianist Jack Baker in the seductive romance "The Fabulous Baker Boys"; the shock-jock talk radio host Jack Lucas in "The Fisher King"; the air crash survivor Max Klein in "Fearless"; the quintessential slacker Jeff Lebowski, aka 'The Dude', in the Coen Brothers "The Big Lebowski"; U.S. President Jackson Evans in the political drama "The Contender" (which garnered a fourth Oscar nomination); the industrialist super-villain Obadiah Stane in the blockbuster "Iron Man"; and, most recently, psychic Army Officer Bill Django in "The Men Who Stare At Goats". With Bad Blake, Bridges would vanish once again into the skin of another man, exposing Bad’s genius and flaws, his loneliness, foolishness and hopefulness, in the course of his unexpectedly life-changing romance with Jean Craddock. It's a powerful, memorable performance and has guarned him his fifth Oscar nomination and his second for best actor. "We knew from the beginning we wanted Jeff without question," Cooper recalls. Bridges says he was drawn like a magnet to the script. "Oh, there were so many wonderful elements to this one. Music, for one, comes to mind. I’ve been playing music since I was a kid so that was a big draw for me. I also loved Scott’s script. We got along instantaneously and he’s very talented." Bad Blake’s life might have gone on just the way it always had: if he never met Jean Craddock. But once he does, Bad is destined to try to be better than he ever has before. It was Bridges who ultimately chose 2003 Paris Film Festival Best Actress Award winner Maggie Gyllenhaal ("Secretary"). "She and Jeff had tremendous chemistry the first time they met," says Cairo. "Maggie is ageless; she’s just an old soul. And she looks so perfect with Jeff. She has an earthiness, a rootedness to her that engenders great empathy." "This movie can only work if you feel like Jean and Bad are completely crazy in love with each other," Gyllenhaal says, "and despite the fact that he’s much older and they might seem like improbable lovers, they’re drawn to each other like magnets. You have to see that Jean is fighting through all of that to make decisions that are rational and reasonable: and she’s having a really hard time with it." "Crazy Heart" opens up a fresh view into the American West, which no matter how modern life becomes remains wild in many ways, full of dogged earnestness and rusty dreams. "I wanted a really timeless quality to the film," Cooper explained, "that naturalistic feeling of great seventies character films. Thematically, you have tough characters and tough situations, so the visuals have to counterpoint that." Cinematographer Barry Markowitz ("Sling Blade") suggested that Cooper balance the film’s intimate interior scenes with the solace of the landscape’s endless skies and infinite vistas. "So we ended up shooting a lot of stuff outdoors, beautiful shots that had us up at three in the morning doing all the dirty work. The idea was to really open the story up."
The Verdict
"Once again, Bridges ability to bring to the screen, characters that leave an indelible impression on cinemagoers, is showcased with an Oscar worthy performance (his fifth attempt), this time as a boozing, womanizing country and western singer named 'Bad' Blake. Even with his faults and unashamed vices, 'Bad' is, thanks to Bridges, a character who grows on you. Yes he's pitiful. Yes he's an alcoholic. And yes, he'd sooner be in some womans pants instead of his own. But despite the obvious, 'Bad', somehow draws us in. There's still a faint flicker of goodness buried deep inside him that audiences will recognize. And so, in spite of all the glaring warning signs, like Gyllenhaal's character Jean Craddock, we are drawn to him. Like her, we grow to love 'Bad', admire him and, as the Americans would say: 'root for him'. The 'feel' of the film is superb, as is Markowitz's interior and exterior cinematography. The songs Bridges and the cast perform add to the authenticity. "Crazy Heart" is undeniabley entertaining. Fortunately you don't have to be a Country and Western fan to enjoy this quality production. Well worth seeing. 4 STARS."
The Story Line
 'Bad' Blake still lives his life out on the road, playing long-ago #1 hits in third-rate beer joints and bowling alleys to aging crowds as drunk and yearning as he is, while his fleeting fame slides into obscurity. The most he can hope for these days is to open a big concert for his young protégé, Tommy Sweet. Tommy learned everything from 'Bad', except he managed to become rich and famous from it. Then, one night in Santa Fe, Bad meets a local journalist and single mom Jean Craddock and falls for her harder than usual. Bad promises nothing to her and Jean knows she’d be a fool to believe he could. Somehow they continue winding up in each other’s arms. But can Bad, who barely keeps his own head above badly troubled waters, really take care of anyone else? And will his attempt to come to terms with his own starkly human limitations result in a last chance for a sweet drop of redemption.
Who's Playing Who?
Jeff Bridges
Maggie Gyllenhaal
Jack Nation
James Keane
Colin Farrell
Robert Duvall
Anna Felix
Paul Herman
Tom Bower
Ryan Bingham
Beth Grant
Rick Dial
Debrianna Mansini
Jerry Handy
Ryil Adamson
J. Michael Oliva
David Manzanares
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Bad Blake
Jean
Buddy
Manager
Tommy Sweet
Wayne
Barmaid
Jack Greene
Bill Wilson
Tony
Jo Ann
Wesley Barnes
Ann
Cowboy
Ralphie
Bear
Nick
The Production Team
Director
Writer
From the
Producers

Original Music
Cinematography
Film Editor
Casting
Production Designer
Art Direction
Set Decoration
Costume Designer
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Directed by Scott Cooper
Written by Scott Cooper
the novel "Crazy Heart" by Thomas Cobb
T-Bone Burnett/Judy Cairo/Rob Carliner
Scott Cooper/Robert Duvall
Stephen Bruton & T-Bone Burnett
Barry Markowitz
John Axelrad
Mary Vernieu
Waldemar Kalinowski
Ben Zeller
Carla Curry
Doug Hall
Run Time 111 minutes
Rated M [AUST]
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