Cozy little movie regarding sibling rivalry in the music world. The title character is not the main character, but is instead the latter's sister (and a synonym for a state of grace, an unapproachable ideal, a pipe dream), a country/folk singer of Alison Krauss-like talent and integrity, with a devoted regional following, and a seemingly charmed existence in the bucolic Northwest. But only seemingly, and chiefly by comparison with that of her ungifted sister, Sadie, a heavy-on-the-eyeliner, heavy-on-the-trinkets, heavy-on-the-hooch, heavy-on-the-dope wannabe who must count herself fortunate when she is playing bowling-alley or Jewish-wedding gigs and is not cleaning up motel rooms for pocket money. Mare Winningham, as the blessed sister, beautifully maintains an air of tight-lipped serenity that might, through the bleary eyes of the cursed sister, pass as saintliness or at least queenliness, but which with clearer vision would be seen as simply not-going-to-get-into-it exasperation and exhaustion. Winningham does her own singing besides, and no less beautifully, including a goose-bump-raising rendition of Stephen Foster's "Hard Times," unabridged, right at the outset. Jennifer Jason Leigh, the cursed one, does her own singing, too, though it's more like screeching, in addition to her own shooting of pool. The screenplay by her real-life mother, Barbara Turner, indulges and encourages the actress in her penchant for letting it all hang out, or more graphically for tearing open her torso and ripping out her guts, for plumbing the lower depths and for orbiting the dark side. She reaches the summit of her art (if that's not a topographic contradiction) in her "dramatic reading" of Van Morrison's "Take Me Back," the emotional climax of the movie and as sloppy and unseemly and mortifying a plunge into inconsolable nostalgia as you are ever apt to witness. Ulu Grosbard, an actors' director, gets good work from his secondary players as well: the almost unbearably touching Max Perlich (with his stilted use of the phrase "very much so") as the nerdy grocery-delivery boy who attaches himself with canine fidelity to the needy Sadie; and the dependable Ted Levine (with his idiosyncratic loud-mumble technique of vocalization) as the husband of the pampered Georgia. (1995) — Duncan Shepherd
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