Song Sung Blue Review: Shining Like a Diamond

Every musician plays a part, a stage persona that they throw on like James Brown’s cloak, but some of them are reviving a role someone else created. We’re not talking about pale imitators, like all the glam metalers who tried to be Axl Rose and Madonna wannabes that clogged up the Eighties charts. These are the celebrity impersonators, and it’s a good living if you get it right. I have a friend whose professional musical career is being a Beatle, and he’s making better money on cruises and nostalgia tours than your favorite indie musician ever pulls down with some cool residency.

To a certain degree, it’s about putting your ego to one side, and that’s not quite possible for Mike Sardina (Hugh Jackman), a failed rocker with an unearned big head whose manager (Fisher Stevens) is also his dentist. He’s Lightning, man, and he doesn’t need to be pretending to be Don Ho at some state fair. Luckily for him, there’s an immediate musical and romantic spark between Mike, a recovering alcoholic and Vietnam veteran, and Patsy Cline impersonator Claire Stengl (Kate Hudson), the only person who can convince him to be the great Neil Diamond. Or rather a Neil Diamond impersonator – or, as Lightning insists, a Neil Diamond interpreter, since no one could really match the great one.

Crazy as it sounds, the script by writer/director Craig Brewer (Hustle and Flow, Black Snake Moan) is based on the true story of real-life Milwaukee musical couple Mike and Claire Sardina, aka Lightning and Thunder. For non-Cheeseheads, their highs and lows were already recounted in Greg Kohs’ 2008 Slamdance award-winning documentary, also titled Song Sung Blue. Warning: Do not watch the doc first, because knowing the roadblocks and curses that afflict this perfectly nice Midwestern couple and their blended family definitely dent Brewer’s storytelling.

It’s a perfect role for Hugh Jackman, the last of the great song-and-dance men and an actor with a gift for grounding extreme characters. Of course, he’s assisted by the slight silliness of the scenario, of how Lightning and Thunder traveled in a converted tourist tram, or how they played with Pearl Jam (no, not kidding, that really happened). However, their life has more downs than ups, which explains why they keep holding on to their musical dreams as a source of escape.

Sometimes it feels like the hits keep on coming, but what Brewer’s script really gets is that that is how life works: If it’s just one bad thing, then maybe people can deal with them, but all too often it becomes a cascading failure. Jackman and Hudson are still Hollywood versions of the real-life Sardinas, but there’s a working class earnestness about them, as two fortysomethings struggling with poverty, hardship, and adapting to therapy culture as they tackle their struggles head-on. Jackman greys out his trademark Wolverine sideburns, but that’s just a hint of the aging around the eyes, the creping of the skin that’s part of what makes both Claire and Mike feel like real people.

Not every impersonation is perfect: While Jackman gets Diamond’s honeyed purr, and Hudson adopts that Badger State inflection, John Beckwith looks and sounds more like Gerard Way imitating Eddie Vedder than he does Eddie Vedder. But Brewer’s never trying to say these artists could pass as the original, as shown by Michael Imperioli as a grey-haired Buddy Holly tribute act. Instead, it’s all about the joy. It’s about wearing a sparkly jacket on the stage of an all-you-can-eat buffet and having the audience look up from their crab claws and join in with the “Ba-ba-baaa!” for “Sweet Caroline.” It’s about the goodness in the world as Mike and Claire struggle through it all and get their time in the sun – not just on stage, but in moments like when Claire’s daughter, Rachel (Ella Anderson, perfectly feisty), calls Mike poppa or when her son, Dayna (Hudson Hensley), picks up his adopted dad’s coffee habit.

That’s also all caught in Kohs’ documentary, viewing which will highlight how many Hollywood-style liberties Brewer takes with the Sardinas’ real story. That includes an astonishing coda that was probably cut because, if it wasn’t captured by Kohs’ camera, you would say that it was a Hollywood contrivance. Brewer also ignores that Kohs and his crew were filming across eight years of their lives, and his script glosses over what a big deal Lightning and Thunder were in Milwaukee, and how much the city shaped them. Yet it’s still a touching depiction of two people in love. At the end of the day, Brewer reminds us, it’s all about hands touching hands.

This article appears in December 26 • 2025.