Word: baddings
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...bitterness, Bad might be closer to Jack Baker of The Fabulous Baker Boys, 20 years down the road and without Michelle Pfeiffer's Susie Diamond for motivation. Bad is angry at just about everything, from what might have been in his personal life (there's an abandoned son out there somewhere) to the fact that his slick protégé Tommy Sweet (a spot-on Colin Farrell) is hugely successful, largely on the basis of having turned one of Bad's songs into a smash hit. Bad would tell you Tommy's career was never...
...That's not to say that Bad is just an older Dude. Certainly there are similarities - both men wander around with a lowball in hand, pot belly swaying in gentle tandem with the ice clinking against the side of the glass, and Crazy Heart even opens at a bowling alley. But whereas bowling was the Dude's favorite sport and main occupation, for Bad, finding himself performing at a bowling alley in Pueblo, Colo., is a misery. He's a legend in the country-and-western scene, but he's 57, broke and no longer even afforded the dignity...
...Moreover, Bad has a lot more menace in him than the Dude; he's so self-destructive that anyone around him is likely to get hit with some sort of whiskey-soaked shrapnel. Indeed, alarm bells go off the minute we hear that the love interest he meets on the road, an aspiring journalist named Jean (Maggie Gyllenhaal), has a 4-year-old. (And she's a single mother, movie shorthand for Vulnerable with Babysitting Issues...
...Every movement of Bridges' performance reveals not just the mess Bad is, but something about the man he once was. There is a terrifically naked moment when Jean catches him watching porn on the couch, with nothing but a towel tossed over his paunch. She's embarrassed, but more important, he's mortified, and for the first time, as he attempts to gather the shambles of his dignity around him, we see that Bad is not beyond caring. Cooper nicely juxtaposes this with a later scene of Bad's seducing Jean when she's on her way out a different...
...that meticulous craft, Bridges still gives such an organic performance, you sometimes forget it's him you're watching (peering into that face, you'd swear it's Kris Kristofferson) and that he's playing a fictional character. When Bridges sings Bad's wistful, weary songs - written by producer T-Bone Burnett and a group of other musicians, including Ryan Bingham, who has a small part in the film - you feel like this is a guy you might be lucky to find at your local honky-tonk. One of the first lyrics we hear from Bad is "I used...