The Unfettered Critic – February 2026

WE MIGHT HAVE suspected from the movie’s title.

It could’ve been named “Sweet Caroline,” or “Play Me,” or “Beautiful Noise,” or, for crying out loud, “The Story of My Life.” But it wasn’t. It’s titled Song Sung Blue. See the gentle yet obvious foreshadowing?

Those of you who follow this column likely understand that we love musical biographies. We’ve covered the Bob Dylan bio, the Freddy Mercury bio, and the Leonard Bernstein bio. And if you were to ask, we’d say our favorite bio flick is the (much) less recent Tina Turner bio, What’s Love Got To Do With It. Great movies all (although the Bernstein effort could have featured more music). So imagine how excited we were to hear that the music of Neil Diamond was coming to the big screen.

Alas.

Somehow, it turns out that we’d missed a 2008 documentary about a Milwaukee, Wisconsin couple named Mike and Claire Sardina, who were—yes—a Neil Diamond tribute band. Calling themselves “Lightning and Thunder,” these musicians experienced successes, losses, and unanticipated travails, earning them the honor of the documentary, which in turn has been reincarnated as a major motion picture. Which means that Song Sung Blue is a biographical movie based on a biographical documentary of other people doing interpretations of the not-present-at-all, very much missing, Neil Diamond.

Okay, we admit to being a bit harsh here. Song Sung Blue succeeds in every way as quality filmmaking. Scenes of the on-screen audience joining in on the musically punchy “bam, bam, bam” while the couple sings “Sweet Caroline” easily earned our appreciation. With the versatile actor Hugh Jackman as Mike (“Lightning”), and the equally wonderful Kate Hudson (in her best role since “Penny Lane” in 2000’s Almost Famous) as Claire (“Thunder”), the performances are riveting. And since both actors excel as vocalists, the “Song Sung” parts of the experience deserve multiple viewings.

It’s the “Blue” part that disheartened us.

“We needed to keep the film grounded in realism and authenticity because of its true story origins,” cinematographer Amy Vincent noted in a recent interview. Suffice it to say, the filmmakers succeeded. We readily identified with Lightning as he pulled his routine together; we felt the warmth of romance as he fell in love with Thunder (and she with him); and we enjoyed their climb—along with a great group of instrumentalists—as they developed their near-perfect interpretations. We also relished the background performances of character actors Michael Imperioli, Jim Belushi, and Fisher Stevens, who get to share a bit of the limelight.

Which brings us to the second half of the movie—where the feel-good tone does an abrupt chord change into the minor key of tragic despair.

Because we were unfamiliar with the fate of the musicians in their source documentary, and, more importantly, because we’re good audience members, we didn’t leave at this dark turn of tone. We hoped for the best! But suddenly, confusingly even, we weren’t looking at Lightning as Neil, and we weren’t humming along with the music of Neil; we were seeing Claire as a suffering victim more suitable to Grey’s Anatomy or ER. And this is what makes reviewing Song Sung Blue difficult. Earlier, Kate Hudson had sung her heart out (sounding amazingly like Patsy Cline); now she was breaking our hearts with melodramatic sincerity in an entirely new situation. The thing is, she’s great at it. This latter part of her performance is being touted in Hollywood as “Academy Award worthy.” Good for her.

Unfortunately, the best part of that part didn’t resonate “so good, so good, so good,” for us.