I loved “Song Song Blue," a 2025 movie starring Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson as a Neil Diamond tribute act from Milwaukee around 1990, based on a real-life couple.
This is not a sentence expected I would ever write.
The music is great — as the characters point out, everybody loves Neil Diamond. And the movie wisely does not patronize the characters, or ridicule them, or treat them as camp. It respects the characters and loves them. Jackman is great, but that’s no suprise. I’ve seen him in a few movies and I just expect him to be great. Hudson was a pleasant surprise — “Almost Famous,” released in 2000, is one of my favorite movies, and she is fantastic in that, but I don’t think I’ve seen her in anything since. In “Almost Famous,” she was a precocious teenager and in “Song Song Blue” she’s a middle-aged single mother, world-weary but still upbeat.
The first half of the movie is happy and light as a cloud. Midway through we hit pause and as we stood up to get a snack, I said, “Nothing bad better happen to these people!" Two minutes after we returned to the movie, something terrible does happen and then another near the end. I highly recommend “Song Sung Blue” — but keep a box of Kleenex close.