There’s a line in Crazy Heart that goes something like, “Falling feels like flying, at least for a little while.”

Jeff Bridges in Crazy Heart.

Crazy Heart is the story of an aging, life-worn country singer holding on by a thread about as thick as a guitar string. He’s overweight. A chain smoker.  For the first half of the movie he doesn’t seem to have but one person worrying a lick about him, and that’s his agent. He hasn’t written a song in years, but his protege is one of the biggest country stars in the country. Like every alcoholic, it’s not being drunk he likes; moreover, he’s just not interested in seeing his life through sober eyes.

He’s called Bad Blake, and he’s the kind of guy to whom hope is a four-letter word.

The movie starts us with Blake, played masterfully by the incomparable Jeff Bridges, showing up for a gig at a bowling alley. He needs a drink but he’s broke, and the bar won’t pick up his tab. The manager’s solution is to, and again I paraphrase, “Personally offer you all the free bowling you’d like.”

There’s another line in the movie that really hit home for me. This one from one of the many excellent songs that peppered the narrative, hung like talisman to the deadbeat religion.

“I used to be somebody,” Blake sings. “Now I am somebody else.”

We all grow up thinking we’re going to be President or play first base for the Yankees. We might not all have been somebody yet, but we all at least believed there was a somebody inside us, just waiting to shine through.

Then we grow up. The realities of our limitations and circumstance cast shadows on our dreams. It reaches a point where the fact that, god damn, this might just be how good life gets stops feeling like a splash of cold water to the face. Suddenly at some point in life (for a lot of us, at least), life starts to feel like one great cold water flood of inescapable reality. The mistakes cannot be unmade. Once some knots are tied, they can’t be undone. You know that the flood isn’t going to end up at no water park; the final splash down is in the River Styx, and there’s no kind of floaties that can help you once you’re there.

That’s why people like Bad Blake drink. It’s why people smoke pot, or shoot up, or do lines.

Because the reality is, we’re all falling. At least when you’re high you get to flip the script and feel like you’re flying.

***

Bridges and Gyllenhaal in Crazy Heart.

It’s a movie, so of course the burnout that is Bad Blake doesn’t simply fade away. Like all saved wretches (at least the male wretches), it is a woman who comes to Blake’s rescue. And damn if she isn’t beautiful and vulnerable and contrary, not to mention played with dignity and heart by Maggie Gyllenhaal. I usually don’t like Maggie Gyllenhaal, but in this movie she won me over. Her character, a single-mom journalist named Jean, is Blake’s angel, and for that you can’t help but fall a little in love with her.

This is a bit of a sidenote, but women of the world, hear me now: Us men need saving by you. Each and every one of us. That now-cliche line in Jerry Maguire about “you complete me” and shit? It’s spot on. Don’t ever let a man tell you different. And thank you, to all the Jeans that I’ve been blessed to have come through my life.

Anyway, to say much more about the plot would be giving too much away of this film that was superb in just about every possible way. Jeff Bridges more than deserved the Golden Globe he won for the role. The supporting actors, most notably the consummate professional Robert Duvall, are all full-rounded characters that make decisions that feel real, and not just to move along the plot. The soul of the movie is found in Bridges’ face but also in his voice as he sings one of the best soundtracks of the last ten years.

See this movie because though we’re all flawed and have made mistakes we can’t undo, there’s always hope. Crazy Heart reminds us that while we can’t always make right what we’ve made wrong, there’ll be a new thing tomorrow, a fresh thing, just waiting to be made beautiful by our grace.

We’ve just got to be sober enough to see it.

Crazy Heart opens at the Naro tonight.