Song Sung Blue takes its name from a Neil Diamond classic and spins a stranger‑than‑fiction tale about a tribute band called Lightning and Thunder. Mike, played by Hugh Jackman, meets Claire, Kate Hudson’s Patsy Cline impersonator, backstage at a cover artist showcase.
He resists becoming a Neil Diamond clone until she convinces him to interpret the songs his way, kicking off a whirlwind romance that leads to marriage and their joint act.
Director Craig Brewer builds their story around Diamond’s catalog, with the couple performing hits like “Sweet Caroline” and “Soolaimon” at gigs that grow from small clubs to opening for Pearl Jam.
They blend families too: Mike’s daughter Angela (King Princess) and Claire’s Rachel (Ella Anderson) navigate step‑sibling tension amid their parents’ rock‑star dreams. Mashable and Rotten Tomatoes both highlight how the film uses Diamond’s upbeat choruses to mirror the highs of creative collaboration and blended family life.
The first act hums with earnest energy. Jackman channels a Vietnam vet turned sober dreamer whose larger‑than‑life stage persona hides vulnerability. Hudson brings bouncy Midwestern charm to Claire, a woman who chooses joy despite depression meds and past hardships.
Supporting turns from Michael Imperioli as a grumpy Buddy Holly guy and Jim Belushi as a working‑class producer add humor and heart to their circle.
Brewer keeps things light and accessible, framing performances to capture crowd sing‑alongs and the rush of nailing a cover. The story celebrates everyday artists who find purpose in imitation, turning Diamond’s music into a lifeline for misfits chasing recognition.
Accident Shakes The Band: Hudson’s Turn Steals The Show
Disaster strikes when a car crashes into their home, leaving Claire with a partial leg amputation and spiraling into painkiller dependency.
This shift tests their marriage, the band, and Claire’s will to perform, as jealousy and arguments erupt over her recovery. Independent and ScreenRant note how the film follows Mike into the bathroom after fights, leaving Claire’s pain at a distance, which undercuts the intimacy.
Hudson rises above the script’s pitfalls. Her portrayal of a blue‑collar mom facing disability feels relatable, not saintly, earning Golden Globe nods and Oscar whispers.
Peter Travers calls it her best since Almost Famous, blending resilience with raw frustration. Jackman’s Mike grows on viewers too; his broad bravado starts cartoonish but reveals a man desperate for validation, making later vulnerability hit harder.
Song Sung Blue (Credit: Universal Pictures)
The blended family subplot adds warmth. Angela and Rachel bond over parental quirks, while Mustafa Shakir and Fisher Stevens bring laughs as bandmates.
Recovery montages and confessional scenes rush some beats, but musical numbers ground the drama, with covers syncing to emotional arcs. WAMC and Butler’s Cinema Scene praise how the film tackles life’s joys and pains head‑on, showing hope amid setbacks.
Critics like those at 2 Unpaid Movie Critics find it absorbing in the moment, with old‑school comfort that appeals without taxing. CinemaScore A rating reflects audience love for its sincerity.
Oscar Buzz Misses The Point: Why This Charming Drama Stays Small
Song Sung Blue screams awards bait, but that risks inflating a perfectly fine crowd‑pleaser into something it is not. ScreenRant warns that hype around Hudson and Jackman could do the film a disservice, turning pleasant entertainment into an overhyped contender.
Film Freak Central dubs it the Golden Corral of movies: emotionally easy, mentally cheap, and pure middlebrow nostalgia bait.
The Independent critiques how it romanticizes subjects to the point of flattening humanity, unlike the source 2008 documentary that probed real curiosity about hardship.
Mike’s heart issue resolves too neatly, and Claire’s arc blinks from tragedy to triumph via montage. Reddit’s OscarRace users see Hudson as a possible nominee but note competition from edgier roles like Emma Stone’s.
Brewer’s direction prioritizes visibility over artistry; cinematographer Amy Vincent keeps everyone in frame during numbers, sacrificing intimacy for broad appeal.
PopEntertainment and The Film Verdict call it earnest and corny, ideal for celebrating cover artists without pretension. The supporting cast shines: Imperioli’s humor, Belushi’s relatability, and the daughters’ fierce turns add layers.
The release strategy fits its vibe. Focus Features dropped it on Christmas Day for holiday crowds seeking tears and tunes, earning strong word‑of‑mouth.
Facebook groups and Wired promo pieces frame it as cozy counterprogramming to blockbusters. YouTube reviewers like The Awards Contender give it solid marks for comfort viewing.
Keep it away from Oscars, not because it lacks merit, but because awards would force it into a prestige box it never aims for. Song Sung Blue works best as unpretentious fun: a Neil Diamond love letter that hugs you, makes you sing, and sends you home smiling. For that, no statuette is needed.
Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus frame Cover-Up as not just a portrait of Seymour Hersh but also an accusation that American news culture repeatedly shields power until forced to do otherwise.
The documentary revisits Hersh’s biggest stories, My Lai, Abu Ghraib, CIA domestic spying, and the secret bombing of Cambodia, as recurring examples of atrocities that major outlets initially resisted, minimized, or tried to rationalize.
The film’s opening stretch sets the tone with Hersh in late-career mode, shuttling between calls and documents while recounting how his Vietnam reporting ran through a small antiwar news service before bigger papers reluctantly followed.
That choice underlines one of the movie’s harshest claims: that what gets branded as “dishonest media” often looks more like nervous institutions worried about patriotism, advertiser comfort, and access until a story’s momentum makes silence impossible.
Cover-Up leans heavily on archival footage, from Nixon-era panic over Hersh’s scoops to images from Abu Ghraib and more recent material from Gaza, to show a repeating pattern of denial, pushback, and belated accountability.
Time magazine’s background on the film notes that Poitras and Obenhaus even secured on-camera testimony from Camille Lo Sapio, a previously anonymous source behind the Abu Ghraib photos, reinforcing how much risk falls on individuals while large outlets weigh reputational damage.
At the same time, reviewers at outlets like Screen Rant and the Wall Street Journal stress that Poitras refuses to turn Hersh into a simple heroic monument.
The documentary includes his controversial Nord Stream pipeline story, which relied on a single anonymous source and drew strong skepticism from peers, as a way of asking when skepticism toward “dishonest media” veers into its own blind spots.
When Newsrooms Blink: Self‑Censorship, Access, And American Myth
One of Cover-Up’s sharpest threads concerns self-censorship, the quiet editorial instinct to soften or sideline stories that cast the United States as an aggressor rather than a defender.
Rotten Tomatoes’ overview points out that Poitras and Obenhaus are less interested in biography than in using Hersh’s reporting as a running test of how far mainstream media will go before it flinches.
Critics at Jacobin and Asia Society have long argued that Hersh’s work exposed not only specific crimes but also the way official narratives get laundered into conventional wisdom through friendly coverage.
The documentary echoes those debates, showing how his revelations about biological weapons tests that killed thousands of sheep or abuse inside Abu Ghraib were initially met by major outlets repeating military denials almost word for word.
A Time feature on the film frames Hersh’s early Chicago reporting as his training ground for spotting how police and political power shape what gets written, long before Vietnam turned him into a national figure.
Cover Up (Credit: Netflix)
That context matters because Cover-Up keeps cutting between the past and the present Gaza campus protests and the war on terror to argue that institutional pressures on journalists have not disappeared, only become more sophisticated.
The documentary and its reviewers also draw a line from Hersh’s era to current fights over “embedded” reporters, national security leaks, and whistleblower prosecutions.
By revisiting threats against sources and the constant risk of losing access, the film suggests that dishonesty is rarely a cartoonish fabrication; it is more often a series of small compromises that, over time, leave the harshest truths outside the frame.
Hero Or Hazard: How Cover-Up Handles The Hersh Debate
Poitras already has a reputation for politically charged documentaries, and early reviews highlight how Cover-Up continues that streak while allowing space for doubt about its central figure.
The Guardian describes the film as a tense, tightly structured argument that America’s violent record abroad is inseparable from the media’s reluctance to confront it, yet it also acknowledges that Hersh’s later work raises real questions about sourcing and confirmation.
Screen Rant’s review, which coined the “dishonest media under the microscope” framing, praises the film for showcasing Hersh’s determination but criticizes it for sidestepping some of the deepest concerns about whether he sometimes shapes facts to fit his expectations.
Those concerns are most visible in the Nord Stream segment, where the movie presents both the impact of his allegations and the discomfort among journalists who feel his evidentiary standards have shifted with age and status.
Netflix’s own description of Cover-Up calls it a “political thriller” about one man’s fight to expose institutional violence, a marketing line that fits neatly with Poitras’s storytelling instincts.
Original Cin’s coverage of the documentary stresses Hersh’s age and stamina: at 88, he is still chasing sources, still distrusted by governments, and still controversial among fellow reporters.
Seen through that lens, Cover-Up lands as both a tribute and a provocation, forcing audiences to wrestle with a messy idea that one journalist’s flaws do not erase the failures of the institutions that often tried hardest to ignore him.
