Crazy Heart, an amiable on-the-road-again yarn, showcases a singing and strumming Jeff Bridges to great, grizzled effect. Bridges plays Bad Blake, a past-his-prime, whiskey-guzzling singer-songwriter whose near-legendary status in country-music circles is no substitute for a regular paycheck. As the movie opens, he’s arriving for a gig with a pick-up band at a bowling alley in Pueblo, Colorado, where he has something of an epiphany that his career isn’t going exactly the way he had planned. (Given that I grew up in Pueblo, I found this hilarious, even though the location doesn’t look or feel anything like the real town.)

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