MARCH 31, 2016
For lovers of movie bios of musical biographies, these two weeks look on paper like nirvana.
Last Friday, two musical bios opened — Marc Abraham’s bio of country singer Hank Williams “I Saw the Light” and “Born to Be Blue,” Robert Budreau’s bio of jazz trumpeter Chet Baker — while a third, Don Cheadle’s bio of Miles Davis, “Miles Ahead,” opens in limited release this Friday.
“I Saw the Light,” written and directed by Marc Abraham (whose only other directing credit was 2008’s odd inventor saga “Flash of Genius”) covers Williams’ rise from a small-town radio entertainer to chart-topping country superstar in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
The film was once thought to be a potential 2015 Oscar contender, but once the critics screened it, that hope went out the window, and Sony Pictures Classics wisely moved its release to March.
Why “I Saw the Light” doesn’t work from beginning to end is pretty clear. There’s a certain template for music biographies that has proven to be reliable over the years. It starts with meeting this-star-in-the-making who has big dreams and yearns to show the show the world his talent. He gets a lucky break, hits it big and enjoys the good life until he meets up with drugs, booze or sex, and it all comes crashing down around him. Depending on whose bio you’re telling, the hero either picks himself up and triumphs again or dies tragically with lot of tears.
There’s a reason why this template works — the writer is creating a large and satisfying arc for the hero, which touches on all emotions. If you violate this template, you do it at your own peril.
“I Saw the Light” violates it, and how! When we first meet Hank Williams (Tom Hiddleston), he’s just a small-town radio entertainer but one who’s got the drive and determination to make it to the stage of the Grand Ole Opry. But he’s a drunk already, with little desire to sober up. He marries his girlfriend Audrey Shepherd (Elizabeth Olsen), who becomes his manager and wants to sing onstage with him, even though she doesn’t possess one iota of talent. By some unexplained miracle, he soon has the #1 country song in the US and makes it to the stage of the Opry. He drinks, cheats on his wife, sings a little, drinks, cheats on his wife, sings… lather, rinse, repeat. The repetition gets very old very quickly. Even the big death scene fails to land, occurring off-camera. Yawn.
But probably the most unforgivable sin that “I Saw the Light” commits is its failure to communicate why Hank Williams is one of country music’s most influential performers of all time. The film lacks a dimension that is essential for any music bio to be great — a scene that shows us the artistic process by which the artist creates. Just last year, the two best music bios took the time to reveal the artist at work — “Love & Mercy’s” Brian Wilson (Paul Dano) in the recording studio assembling the disparate elements that became the Beach Boys’ legendary album “Pet Sounds” and N.W.A. working together to perfect their rhymes in “Straight Outta Compton.” Without seeing Williams’ songwriting skills at work, he’s simply a drunk philanderer who got lucky enough to sing some hit songs.
Hiddleston and Olsen are both top-flight actors, whom you can watch working hard to try to get inside their characters, but Abraham’s script simply fails them. “I Saw the Light” is one big botch from beginning to end, and its failure will make it that much more difficult to get any Hank Williams movie made that will be worthy of its subject’s talent.
GRADE: D+
