Word: busey
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...driving music notwithstanding, The Buddy Holly Story is at heart a very old-fashioned film. As Robert Gittler's fictionalized script follows Holly's rise from obscurity in Lubbock. Texas, to national superstardom, it embraces all the romantic clichés of showbiz success sagas. Holly (Gary Busey) leaves behind his suffocating small-town girlfriend (Amy Johnston) to seek the bright lights of New York; he overcomes early rejection to become the toast of the record industry; he outgrows his original back-up musicians (Don Stroud. Charlie Martin Smith) and creates a revolutionary new sound. By the time...
...Gary Busey, himself a part-time rock musician with Leon Russell's band, delivers Holly's hits adequately; his That'll Be the Day palls only when compared point-blank with the original. As an actor. Busey comes into his own this time around, after a career of character roles in little-seen films (Straight Time, The Last American Hero). Whether he is playing Holly as a hick in the big city or a lovesick husband or a teen-age idol, Busey always seems convincing. He brings a swagger to the musical numbers and an engaging buck...
Given the limitations of the screenplay, the cast flesh out the characters as much as humanly possible. Harry Dean Stanton, M. Emmet Walsh and Gary Busey all create idiosyncratic lowlifes out of drab dialogue. Theresa Russell (The Last Tycoon), playing Max's all too obligatory love interest, is powerfully sexy. As for Hoffman, he works hard and well to create a man who lives in a state of constant punishment. It's an admirable job, but one sadly wasted in a film that punishes the audience almost as much as it does the people onscreen...
...Jack Elam) is a shaggy boozer with an itchy foot and no talent at all for drawing uplifting morals from life's little disasters. "Hard work gives a man character-and a slight stoop," he says. Mom is dead, and the head of the family is Truckie (Gary Busey) a 24-year-old high school dropout who is more admired by his siblings because he has done time for "grand theft, auto" than for his efforts to raise them respectably while completing his self-reformation by returning to school and getting...