Directed by Craig Brewer ◆ written by Craig Brewer and Greg Kohs ◆ Produced by John Davis, John Fox, and Craig Brewer ◆ Distributed by Focus Features
Mike and Claire Sardina of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, were a likable couple with a story of compelling social interest. Through the 1990s, the Sardinas were at the center of a locally beloved Neil Diamond cover act, Lightning & Thunder. They met in the Milwaukee music scene and, in short order, became a musical and romantic partnership that endured nearly two decades before Mike’s death in 2006. Their love story is undiluted late 20th-century Americana. Both were divorced with children, and struggled defiantly to balance their musical ambitions with the day-to-day challenges of working-class life. Their story, with all its complications, is interesting for what it reveals about the life and struggles of everyday Americans.
The Sardinas’ life story in its unvarnished form can be found in Greg Kohs’ shoestring-budget 2008 documentary, Song Sung Blue. Unfortunately, despite Kohs’ involvement in Craig Brewer’s newly released dramatic retelling of the Sardinas’ story, the new Song Sung Blue is a Hollywood translation serving ends largely unaligned with those of American families like the Sardinas.
The first obvious disparity between Brewer’s film and reality, if one has seen photos of the Sardinas, is that Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson are entirely too beautiful for the parts. Hudson’s mere physical presence steals all the scenes with the band, whether she’s in a clinging sweater at a garage rehearsal or in a skimpy dress showing off her cleavage at a biker gig. Kohs’ film reveals a Claire Sardina of a more typically stocky Midwestern American female aesthetic. The New York Times raved about Hudson’s performance, claiming it breaks her out of her rom-com straitjacket. She does sing better than I would have imagined (Jackman is not quite up to the task here), but she is too glamorous for the role.
That Brewer chose Hudson tells you everything about the director’s desire to augment the humbler reality with Hollywood stardust. The real Mike Sardina was a short, craggy-faced man, miles from Jackman’s muscular 6’2”. On the couple’s first date, they are both eating a corn dog and fries, yet fit and hot in a way nobody who regularly indulges in that diet could possibly be. Onstage, they are veritable icons of Hollywood aesthetic perfection. Of course, this is what the movies do, but here, in a film based on a true story, this visual deception conceals unpleasant realities to sustain a myth the film wants us to believe.
Lightning & Thunder had been on a decade-long run when Claire was struck by a car and required the amputation of part of one leg. In the wake of this accident, she fell into depression and addiction. The film depicts this period with genuine pathos, including in a merciless hospital-bed scene—the only time in the film Hudson does not look like a movie star. But even this ghastly event is portrayed as merely a bump in the road in the dream of Lightning & Thunder. In short order, Claire is telling Mike, “I just want to shine… I want to be Thunder again!”
It is easy to see how these scenes might be compelling to a general audience, but the film encourages uncritical viewing by neglecting to show the costs involved in the Sardinas’ quest for stardom. In Kohs’ documentary, we see abundant evidence of the tensions in this family. Claire’s mother says everything one would expect from a reasonable person in such a family. “When we got together with Mike as a family, it was as though Vegas was right around the corner,” she tells her daughter. “Do you really think that you would make the big time at this age?”
No one says anything like that in Brewer’s film. Later in the documentary, the wise old woman tells the camera, “That they don’t have gigs would, I think, be an indication to them that the heyday is over.” Still, Claire remains committed to her obvious delusion. “We’re in a bit of a slump,” she says, while dreaming of the “one phone call” that could change it all. Meanwhile, Claire’s children lament the fact that there is no food in the refrigerator. Her response is to complain, “I’m tired of being bugged by these kids, by my mom, by everybody.”
At one point in the documentary, Claire tries to convince Mike to find more financially rewarding work. “I got my eyes on the prize,” he tells her after a long stare. We learn that Mike’s first marriage ended because his ex-wife was tired of his failure to provide a steady income for the family. His brother describes their father, also a musician, as someone who “didn’t want to have kids… sorta like Mike.”
There is one understated scene in the Brewer’s biopic when the two daughters commiserate about their “artistic” parents. Mike’s daughter Angelina describes his time in Vietnam, crawling over bodies in tunnels, and his subsequent alcoholism, while Claire’s daughter Rachel admits her mother suffers from depression and is on medication. Angelina then relates something about her father that might be true of both “Lightning” and “Thunder.” Addicts, she says, often trade one addiction for another—music is just
the current form.
During Claire’s hospitalization, Rachel gets pregnant. In the biopic, once Claire has regained her faith in the act, this family drama is treated as something minor that resolves itself effortlessly. After the birth, we see Claire and Rachel smiling enthusiastically at the adoptive couple who take the child. Rachel beams beatifically as the Monkees’ upbeat tune “I’m a Believer” clangs inappropriately in the background. The documentary tells a darker story. “You told me I couldn’t keep it,” Rachel admonishes her mother. “Weren’t your exact words ‘You’re not bringing that thing home from the hospital?’” Claire responds, “Does the sound of ‘Grandma Thunder’ sound good to you? I don’t think so.”
Despite plenty of evidence to the contrary, the biopic does all it can to impress on viewers that Lightning & Thunder was often on the cusp of making it to the big time. In 1995, Pearl Jam front man Eddie Vedder, who had heard about the act, invited them to come onstage during an encore in Milwaukee. They asked Vedder to join their performance, but he did not know the song (“Forever in Blue Jeans”) and had to read from a lyric sheet while seated on a stool. It is a funny and endearing sequence, but hardly the show-stopping number into which the film transforms it. There, Vedder asked the couple to be Pearl Jam’s opening act, and the impression given is that this could have been a mighty impetus to propel them into the artistic stratosphere. “We were so close,” Claire says.
There are myriad stories of greatly talented performers who, for complex and often heartbreaking reasons, never reach stardom. I think in this vein of Barbara Mauritz, a singer in the ’60s San Francisco scene who was more soulful and gifted than Janis Joplin but who, unaccountably, fell into obscurity. Many musicians who achieve the kind of local renown the Sardinas did are competent artists who can please a bar crowd but lack the creative power to tap into anything beyond that. The idiosyncrasies of working in the pop music industry are well-known. A friend in the right place, making the right call, or being at the right venue when the right executive shows up, can make all the difference. Yet nothing in the Sardinas’ career indicates they were anything more than a fun tribute band, like the hundreds or thousands of others playing somewhere in the U.S. at this moment.
The truest scene of the biopic, in artistic terms, might be in the first 10 minutes, when Mike goes to play a gig as a Don Ho impersonator. In the dressing room, we see doppelgängers of James Brown, Willie Nelson, Elvis, Buddy Holly, and Tina Turner, along with Claire as Patsy Cline. Mike chafes at miming Ho and loses the gig. Claire convinces him that he looks more like Neil Diamond, and Lightning & Thunder is thus born. Every reasonably sized town in the U.S. knows bands like this, and they are tremendous fun on a Saturday night, but do not offer a feasible career for most, especially not for people with families to support.
At the biopic’s conclusion, Lightning & Thunder are hired to play in a huge hall when Diamond comes to town, and promoters book them as overflow for his crowd. They sell out. Mike comes on stage via an elevated platform to a full-choir backup. They look like a million bucks, even though Mike has injured his head just before the show. The copious bleeding has miraculously disappeared! Yet just as he is preparing to meet Diamond in a post-concert rendezvous, he collapses into unconsciousness and dies. Pure rock ‘n’ roll myth.
I watched the biopic at a local theater with an audience of central Pennsylvanians who appeared to represent the same socio-economic class as the Sardinas. They laughed at scenes that showed the characters’ deep working-class humanity (such as when Claire, nervous during Mike’s first meeting with her family, tells her daughter, “I’m sweatin’ like a whore in church!”), and they enjoyed the music, as did I.
I wonder if any of them had seen the documentary, and how much they knew about how the Sardinas’ musical career had harmed their families, and how poorly such scenarios typically play out for the working class. The popular illusion of stardom—propagated not only by the music industry, but also by professional sports and, today, by endless online “influencers,” leaves too many chasing fantasies instead pursuing a viable trade. Hollywood is always strangely interested in telling these audiences deceptive stories of the bread and circuses of the entertainment industry.
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