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Kate Hudson and Hugh Jackman in Song Sung Blue (2025)
What we think of as Hollywood stories wouldn’t exist if there weren’t true life examples. Yes, there really are heroes who overcome the odds, killers caught in their own web and lovesick fools who finally make good. They are the sort of folks who populate screenplays and, yes, melodrama sometimes happens. And there really was an unlikely husband-wife duo, calling themselves Lightning and Thunder, who became stars in their hometown and are now putting their hometown on the map with a picture about their lives, Song Sung Blue. They were a Neil Diamond-Patsy Cline tribute act, excuse me, Lightning insisted on being called a “Neil Diamond interpreter.”
Inspired by Greg Koh’s 2008 documentary of the same name, writer-director Craig Brewer (Hustle & Flow) recrafted a true story along Hollywood lines, condensing the chronicle into a series of epochal moments while respecting many of the conditions of the protagonists. In the film, Thunder aka Claire Sardina (Kate Hudson) is described by her teen daughter as under meds for depression, yet comes across as cheerful, perky and up for a challenge. Lightning aka Mike Sardina (Hugh Jackman) survived dangerous duty in Vietnam and became a recovering alcoholic. His daughter says he traded alcohol for a new addiction in the form of music. Behind both Thunder and Lightning are failed marriages, but even if you don’t know the true story, Brewer signals early on that love will keep them together.
I first wrote about Mike Sardina a decade or more before he reinvented himself as the spangle-shirted Lightning. Circa 1980, he was leading a Milwaukee rock band called Positive Traction, and he struck me then, and a decade later in his Lightning guise, as sincerely devoted to the crazy dream of somehow making it big in music. In Song Sung Blue, he admits he’s no songwriter. “I’m an entertainer, I want to make a living” in music, he says, not changing oil at the local garage. Sardina-Lightning was more … feverish in real life than in Jackman’s smoother portrayal.
In the film version, Lightning and Thunder met amidst the sno-cone, wiener-on-a-stick Wisconsin State Fair where they entertained separately at side stages. Lightning’s idea for a Diamond-Cline act may have been locally strategic—Elvis, The Beatles and Buddy Holly had already been claimed—but he might have had a deeper insight about Diamond’s presence in the hearts and memories of listeners.
Although overlooked by the first generation of rock critic-historians, besotted by The Beatles and Bob Dylan, Diamond emerged (like Paul Simon) from New York’s hit-crafting, music publishing milieu with a tuneful ear. Delivered with a striking baritone, his early hits were rock (“Cherry, Cherry,” “Solitary Man”) but he ascended into a thoughtful, genre-less pop music (“Shilo,” “Holly Holy,” “Cracklin’ Rose”) and was dominant on AM radio in the early ‘70s before segueing into adult contemporary banality. If Rolling Stone and Creem ignored him, he solidified his fanbase through dynamic showmanship, becoming a singer-songwriter with something for everyone. As for Cline, she was country-pop crossover before the term was coined.
Lightning and Thunder became a hit at the State Fair and found work on the Midwest casino circuit, but the upper reaches of industry success eluded them before Thunder lost her leg in a freak accident and Lightning died from heart failure. Prior to this film, their closest brush with fame was being asked to open for Pearl Jam. They were recommended for their quirkiness.
Most of Brewer’s Song Sung Blue is more or less true, but I’ll take exception to the depiction of one real-life supporting character, Mark Shurilla, a presence on Milwaukee’s music scene from the ‘70s through the ‘80s before he became a Buddy Holly impersonator. Michael Imperioli plays the late Shurilla as a generic East Coast-style hustler, not the idiosyncratic Milwaukee hustler that he was. Guess no one involved in the production knew him. Which reminds me: Song Sung Blue was shot in New Jersey; although Milwaukee is often referenced, the setting is generic Anytown, USA, with no particular local color.
All that aside, Song Sung Blue is a feel-good musical that distills the complications of life into a Hollywood formula laced with pathos and tragedy. (The subject matter lends itself better to an indie film than a Hollywood treatment—so check out the documentary). However, Jackman and Hudson have great movie chemistry, and boy, they really can sing!
