I Saw The Light: Or How The Hank Williams Bio-Pic Became A Complete Dud


This Friday sees the opening of two bio-pics about two brilliant musicians. The first one is Born To Be Blue, starring Ethan Hawke as Chet Baker, I`ll get a little more into that one soon. The weaker of two films is sadly the one I was looking forward to the most. I Saw The Light stars Tom Hiddleston as Hank Williams, a brilliant country singer-songwriter that influenced pop music forever with his intimately drawn lyrics about blue-collar folks. 

The problem with the film isn`t necessarily Hiddleston, or his partner played by the always great Elizabeth Olsen, it`s more the fact that its writer-director Marc Abraham has concocted an old-fashioned story that is, well, very dull and not that new to the whole musical biopic genre, which, by the way. is the reason why I loved the originally-told narrative of Born To Be Blue. There is nothing new to be said here from Abraham, he seems to think the story is interesting enough to let slide the fact that he can`t really raise a below average screenplay. 

Hiddleston was actually what I was concerned about when I first heard about this movie, but I should have know better. He`s actually pretty damn fantastic here. Abraham is the problem, he`s just not good enough to handle such a task. The soundtrack is great though, I mean how could it not, Hank Williams`songs were little short stories that really tore through the American soul. He was a soul man that was actually white.