Crazy Heart

Crazy Heart aims for the sky and reaches the stars. Jeff Bridges plays seriously alcoholic songster Bad Blake. Blake was obviously bigger at one point in his career but now gigs on a small club circuit that caters to singer/songwriters. Blake's songs surprise with the ease with which they sooth, until you realize the tunes were written by T-Bone Burnett (also a producer) and naturally sound as if they were written by someone whose lifeblood flows with chords and rhythm.
The tunes Bad warbles are a little bit folk, a little bit country. Crazy Heart follows Blake's pattern of life, which consists of rolling into the next town, doing a sound check, hooking up with whatever band has been hired for back-up, and drinking lots of whisky. Crazy Heart was mostly shot in New Mexico so there's a lot of southwest to the look of the film whether the setting is West Texas, Phoenix, or Santa Fe. A couple of sequences take place in Houston but other than a single establishing shot of the downtown skyline the rest of the Space City scenes were shot in Albuquerque (bars, aquarium, home exteriors).
Bridges has one of his best roles ever with Bad Blake, and even if some of his mannerisms or body language looks familiar from film to film (one concert has Bridges playing in a bowling alley) it's hard to imagine more than a handful of performers who could pull off Bad Blake. Perhaps a couple of other actors that come to mind are Robert Duvall who did a similar turn in his Oscar winning role in Tender Mercies (Duvall is also a producer and brief co-star.) and Colin Farrell as Tommy Sweet a former protege of Bad's who now commands stadium crowds and has achieved bigger fame than Blake ever imagined. If Bridges is overshadowed by anybody in the film it's Farrell.
At one point during his tour Blake hooks up with single mother Jean (a constantly amazing Maggie Gyllenhaal) and seems to be back in the saddle again. Oddly this part of the film comes off as the most believable of Bad's journey despite their age difference. That the affair ends badly comes as no surprise since Bad cannot shake the booze monkey off his back.
Crazy Heart is one of the few films I've seen about musicians that correctly nails the atmosphere of creating original music and of making a living on the road.