The year is young, but you are not likely to encounter in 2026 at the cinema two people who love life more than Mike Sardina and Claire Stingl in the wonderfully entertaining new movie Song Sung Blue.
Mike, played by a rangy, companionable Hugh Jackman, is a striving singer in Milwaukee who has battled the bottle, cannot consistently pay his mortgage, and keeps himself going by appearing at the state fair dressed up to look (and sound) like Don Ho. Claire, meanwhile, is a single mother nursing her own dream of supporting herself with her voice, but she, too, pays the bills by impersonating a formerly famous star (Patsy Cline) and, in her case, by doing some hairdressing on the side. “I just want to sing and be happy and feel loved,” says Claire, who is played by Kate Hudson in a career-shifting role that finally liberates her from deathly dull romcoms and revives the spunky spirit that charmed audiences a quarter-century ago in Almost Famous (2000).
But it’s not just the charisma of Jackman and Hudson alone that makes this movie sing: it’s Mike and Claire — real people who were the subject of a documentary in 2008, also called Song Sung Blue. Both the film and the earlier documentary charted Mike and Claire becoming a couple, matrimonially and musically. Pooling their resources, they performed as Lightning & Thunder, ostensibly a Neil Diamond tribute act, but realized with such conviction and flair that it transcended its parasitic origins. Mike died in 2006.
Writer-director Craig Brewer resists the temptation to make Mike and Claire in any way pitiful or worthy of derision. To the contrary, though the film is frequently funny, Brewer takes their ambitions and reversals seriously. For example, the film opens with an unforgiving close-up of Jackman, who, donning the longish dyed hair of someone holding on to youth as he trundles toward middle age, is presented with every line in his face exposed. He is also missing a conspicuous front tooth. As the camera pulls back, we see that Mike is at his Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, but Brewer does not mock his “sober birthday” or his recitation of the Serenity Prayer. Because the film takes Mike’s troubles at face value, we do not so much as smirk when Mike starts singing Diamond’s “Song Sung Blue” to his mates in recovery. This opening scene establishes a human, forgiving tone for a movie in which we are often encouraged to laugh with our heroes but never at them. The movie is like a version of Waiting for Guffman (1996) in which the Christopher Guest character was not a buffoon but an earnest striver with grit and (significant) talent.
Despite his level-headedness, Mike is mightily discontent with the low-wattage gigs that are arranged for him by, of all people, his dentist (Fisher Stevens), who soon replaces that absent tooth. This includes the state fair, where he has been booked to mimic Ho, but at which he would prefer to sing as his own original alter ego, “Lightning.” Considerably more content with her lot is Claire, booked as Cline, but she recognizes in Mike not just a nice guy but someone whose ambitions might fuel her own.
Hudson breathlessly gets across Claire’s excitement when she brings Mike home for a first meeting with her children, and when she prods her recalcitrant teenage daughter Rachel (Ella Anderson) to say something pleasant to him. After all, as Claire sensibly points out, she has had to pretend to be nice to Rachel’s innumerable would-be beaus. As she rounds the bend to 50, Hudson has settled into a midlife bubbliness that naturally calls to mind that of her mother, Goldie Hawn, but with less flightiness and more solidity — frumpiness, even, in the case of this fantastic part. One does not strain to see how Claire has pieced together a life for herself, even if she lives with her half-deaf mother, Frances (Erika Slezak). Hudson also ably captures her character’s Milwaukee accent, especially when saying names such as “Madonna” or lines on the order of “I’m sweating like a whore in church” and “Don’t be a sourpuss.”
Brewer depicts the world of music impersonators with a fair amount of affection, like the rodeo clowns of late 20th-century America. Michael Imperioli appears as a Buddy Holly impersonator who realizes that he has long outlived the man on whom he is modeling his career. Yet Brewer also makes us comprehend Mike and Claire’s almost religious zeal to catapult themselves beyond this habitat. Having decided to give Claire the moniker of “Thunder,” the duo hatch the plans for what becomes Lighting & Thunder, in which Mike performs Diamond standards styled in a vaguely Diamond-esque manner (floppy hair, a penchant for vests) but singing with his own forceful conviction. “I’ve got to be Neil, but I’ve got to be me, too,” he says.
They settle into a rhythm as onstage partners: As Mike works through the Diamond songbook, Claire belts out backup while stationed at her keyboard. Their first gigs are small and frequently humbling, such as a bar where the intended audience was a group of motorhome residents but whose actual patrons turn out to be hardcore motorcycle riders in no mood to sing along to “Sweet Caroline.” Better days are ahead, including a booking opening for Pearl Jam. But the sweetness with which they make their music, no matter their audience, is contagious, especially in an early scene in which Mike and Claire rehearse at home — a scene so hummable that it makes Song Sung Blue an instant candidate for one of the best movie musicals in recent memory.
Viewers familiar with Lightning & Thunder from the previous documentary will anticipate the challenges to come for this couple, especially Claire becoming the victim in an almost unbelievable collision with a car that had inexplicably careened into her front yard — an accident that costs her a limb. The spark departs from Claire, who fills increasingly unaccounted-for hours by watching Family Feud (clips from which are among the refreshingly few tell-tale signs that the movie is set mostly in the 1980s and ’90s). The film is not blind to how easily big dreams can be derailed, especially for the hand-to-mouth creative class in a Midwestern outpost. You could cry seeing Mike cold-call for random job openings while Diamond’s Christmas album is playing in the background, or Rachel confiding in Mike that she has become pregnant, all while Claire has been deposited at a mental hospital.
MAGAZINE: STREAMING AND SOCIAL COSTS
More ups and downs are visited upon this couple in a rare movie that earns its slightly over two-hour running time, but our affection for them remains constant. We love this duo for the passion with which they sing “Soolaimon” and “Holly Holy,” but we mainly love them for their insistence — even in the face of steep odds or outright tragedy — that their lives not be guided by practical concerns alone. Few people would consider a career as a regional, impersonator-style vocalist to be worthwhile; even fewer would, having attained such a career, try to make themselves into something more than a novelty act.
The world is full of dreamers, but the most appealing ones are those like Mike and Claire in Song Sung Blue: the ones who recognize that their reach exceeds their grasp but keep grasping anyway.
Peter Tonguette is a contributing writer to the Washington Examiner magazine.