Can a movie ever fully recapture the unpolished reality of a small-town tribute band’s experience? This is the weight that looms large in “Song Sung Blue,” the big-budget Hollywood reworking of Greg Kohs’ 2008 documentary about the Neil Diamond tribute show of Mike and Claire Sardina, a couple from Milwaukee whose tribute act provided not only their income but also their connection to the world. The original documentary told an interesting story because it was personal, down-and-dirty, and profoundly human it told the story of two people fighting through foreclosure notices, insurance rejection, and catastrophic health emergencies with their performances. Kramer’s follow-through, while flashy and rewarding in fleeting flashes of musical genius, falls short.
Both Jackman and Hudson offer committed performances he substitutes a missing tooth, dirty fingernails, and droopy undies for his character’s street cred; she eschews all traces of glamour to capture the drab resilience of Claire. Both actors’ performances of Diamond’s showstoppers are technically flawless Hudson exudes warmth and Jackman reproduces the songwriter’s distinct voice and ethos. However, the movie’s robust and lengthy musical performances feel odd in a storyline that explores themes of trauma, addiction, and poverty. Brewer’s handling of the story meanders through the territory of the rom-com film and stretches into the realm of melodrama and music concerts without clearly capturing the pulse of the story being told.
But this tonal dissonance is only a symptom of a larger lost opportunity for exploration, and that is within the culture of musical impersonation. There is a long history of Neil Diamond impersonators walking this line between love and camp. But within the field of tribute musicians, authenticity goes beyond merely capturing an aesthetic, because it is, in fact, capturing the emotional structure of a work. As mentioned in the discussion of interpretive authenticity, a musician is free to diverge from absolute adherence to a work if this divergence indicates an intelligence of a higher order of work truth.
The symbiosis found in the documentary can also been found within the live performances of the couple, the Sardinas, and their act, Lightning & Thunder. They employed the use of wind machines found in biker bars and performed with raw enthusiasm, making for a performance setting where camp and authenticity meet. This contrast found within the documentary challenges the audience to think critically on the place of mimicry within a culture fixated on the authenticity of artistic expression. The documentary misses the opportunity where it could have commented on the themes found within such acts and what they express.
The transposition of niche documentaries into mainstream features is fraught with its own set of challenges. The very issue raised in the impact assessments for documentaries is that stories connected to a certain subculture can become neutered if they are fashioned to appeal to the widest possible audience. “Song Sung Blue” was meant to appeal to no one but the Sardinas, its appeal rooted in the fact that their reality could be presented, unfiltered by a perspective that may have appealed to “mainstream” sensibilities. The rubric concerning mainstream features is precisely that they can rob the very detail that makes such stories compelling.
This is reflective of a score compliance versus interpretative authenticity that performance theory is concerned with. Whereas producers such as Karajan have gone on and modified orchestrations by Beethoven in a way that is more congruent with the internal structure of the performance itself, producers for documentaries being adapted into a fictional narrative have to choose between replicating the same structure or adjusting it for a recapture of the emotion. The adaptation by Brewer is very much aimed at creating a spectacular that may recognize that the value inherent in Diamond’s musicality is enough to carry the emotion.
Even with gestures towards the visual aesthetics apparent in the documentary, such as the passage of airplanes flying by the couple’s residence, these features instead become ornamental rather than immersive. Secondary performances, within Imperioli’s kind guitar man or Anderson’s tutting teenage girl, further flesh out the scene without filling the distinction between the energetic musicality inherent within the film and the beneath-it-all struggle. Even an appearance by an Eddie Vedder impersonator belting “‘Forever in Blue Jeans'” is fun but further confounds the sense of purpose within the film.
For those with cinematic insight into the many layers of adaptation, Song Sung Blue can be seen as a study on how the loss of authenticity can happen in the process. It was the depth of feeling in the documentaries that came from its lack of gloss over the hardship, its acceptance of the awkward mixture of camp and sincerity, its close focus on the couple whose art was interwoven with their struggle for survival. In the adaptation, despite great acting and refining musical numbers, the effort to balance all of this in a cohesive tone misses the mark on the cultural value of tribute acts and the artistic expression behind them in favor of a shiny but empty echo of “the song itself.”
