I saw Crazy Heart over the weekend and noticed some similarities to the material we've covered in class. The film tracks a former country legend who finds himself playing small bars and bowling alleys in order to make it. (Jeff Bridges cursing a bowling alley is the opening line. Ha.) The country star is an old school musician who drinks whiskey all day long, drives a '78 GMC Suburban to his shows, and always sports a cowboy hat. The next generation country star (as represented by Colin Farrell, or "Tommy Sweet") takes four tour buses, a pair of semis, and mountains of gear to every show. Tommy doesn't wear a cowboy hat and generally looks like Billy Ray Cyrus. The fans love him though, and there are thousands more of them. Jeff Bridges is left in the dust playing country songs he wrote years ago to tiny audiences, living in trashy motel rooms. The music market has clearly moved on from the days of the old country cowboy. The difference between "real" country and "pop" country is a theme the movie plays with throughout (read: old west versus new west).
Jeff Bridges attempts to adjust his behavior for the times. He meets a girl twenty years his junior (Maggie Gyllenhaal) and opens a relationship with her. The country star's drunken lifestyle proves inherently incompatible however and Maggie calls it off. Bridges goes to rehab, which is a kind of updating of his lifestyle. He tries to domesticate himself so that the girl will take him back. She doesn't.
The story's primary affair is the reconciliation of the old country lifestyle with its new manifestation. We see what parts of that lifestyle the new popular industry appropriates and which parts they leave by the wayside. More often than not, the old country star finds himself in the latter category.
(If any of this feels like a spoiler, it isn't. If you've seen a western before, you could have guessed the story's trajectory.)
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