BEFORE: Bradley Whitford carries over from "The Post", and you can probably tell where I'm going with this by now, since this film shares not one but TWO cast members with a certain comic-book movie that's been killing it at the box office lately. This was going to be my lead-in to that, but I'm going to sneak just one more in tomorrow, and then one more film before taking a few days off. I need to catch up on both television and sleep, and organize some comic books if I have some time after all that.
THE PLOT: The story of country-western singer Hank Williams, who in his brief life created one of the greatest bodies of work in American music. The film chronicles his rise to fame and its tragic effect on his health and personal life.
AFTER: I've got a whole chain of documentaries about musicians on my list, at this point I've watched the biopics about James Brown, Jimi Hendrix, Brian Wilson and many others, so a bunch of documentaries about Bowie, The Eagles, The Beatles, the Stones, Whitney Houston and Amy Winehouse might be a nice change of pace. Then again, it might tend to more than a little depressing, considering how many of those people are now deceased. We'll have to see.
As it is, I didn't know much about Hank Williams going in to this one. I probably know more about Hank Williams Jr. and Hank Williams III, neither of which is really named "Hank" or "Henry" or even "Hiram", but at the end of the day, there's no law against either one calling himself "Hank" if it puts a few more asses in the seats at their concerts. What I learned from this film is that Hank Williams was married twice, had a child with a third woman, had numerous other girlfriends while touring, and had alcohol and drug addictions that caused health problems. So, essentially, he might have been the very first rock star, even though rock and roll hadn't been invented yet.
Throughout his short career, he wrote a lot of number one hits, but also encountered problems when his drinking or health issues caused him to show up late for shows, or sometimes not at all. After struggling for years to get on stage at the Grand Ole Opry, there eventually came a time where the Opry management had to fire him for being unreliable. Then there came that time that he showed up dead, which angered the management even more - that's not really proper rock star behavior. I'm pretty sure that if Keith Richards died tomorrow, he'd probably be able to play at least three more Rolling Stones concerts before anyone noticed. For Hank Williams, though, it turned out to be a great career move, considering how many posthumous hits he had.
It turns out that I knew more Hank Williams songs than I thought, like "Hey Good Lookin" and "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry". I mean, I know the SONGS, and didn't know that he wrote those. I also knew "Move It On Over" because it was covered by George Thorogood, and "Honky Tonk Blues" because it was covered by Huey Lewis & The News. Hey, knowledge is knowledge, no matter where it comes from. But since I'm not big on country/western music, I was unfamiliar with "I Saw the Light" and "Lovesick Blues", and anything below that remains under my radar.
I was in Nashville last October on vacation, and my wife and I stopped at the Johnny Cash museum, Patsy Cline museum, the Country Music Hall of Fame, and the Ryman Auditorium (original home of the Grand Ole Opry) and we paid admission to enter NONE of those places, because neither of us feels any connection to the world of C&W music. It's just not our thing - which is a nice way of saying that we feel most of it is terrible. But most of everything is terrible, really, I think you have to find the 5 or 10% of music or movies or whatever that you DO enjoy and try to focus on that. Why spend money to visit a country music venue that I don't care about? However, on the same trip I did visit Graceland and Sun Records in Memphis, because those places do carry some slight significance in my world.
So, I now know a little bit more about Hank Williams, and thus I care about his story slightly more than I did before. That's about it, the needle moved a little bit, but not significantly. Sorry, that's just the best I can do. There's a lot I didn't quite understand here, like why people thought his wife Audrey's voice was so terrible (it was at least decent enough to sing country, I don't think that bar is all that high) and why that guy attacked Hank in that bar near the start of the film. And yeah, he drank a lot and enjoyed shooting guns off while sitting on the porch, but isn't that true for every country musician? What was the big deal about that?
Also starring Tom Hiddleston (last seen in "Thor: Ragnarok"), Elizabeth Olsen (last seen in "Godzilla"), Cherry Jones (last seen in "Whiskey Tango Foxtrot"), Maddie Hasson, Wrenn Schmidt (last seen in "Our Idiot Brother"), David Krumholtz (last seen in "Bobby"), Josh Pais (last seen in "Music of the Heart"), James DuMont (last seen in "Trumbo"), Casey Bond (last seen in "Moneyball"), Michael Rinne, Joshua Brady, Wesley Robert Langlois, Von Lewis, Fred Parker Jr., Rob Boltin, Douglas M. Griffin (last seen in "Mr. Right"), Garrett Kruithof, Michael Haskins, Elise Fyke, Joe Chrest (last seen in "Butter"), Deadra Moore, Jayson Warner Smith, Cory Hart, Jeff Pope, John Neisler, Denise Gossett, Rod Hermansen, David Maldonado (also last seen in "Trumbo")
RATING: 4 out of 10 empty beer bottles
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