Waylon Payne is a pleasure to see in action, and believable as an esteemed guitarist of the period, but the role that is written is not the life of Hank Garland. There are discrepancies in the chronology of the music, and who was where on what night and what year that are just not forgivable in a bio-pic. A fictional period piece can play with facts like that, but not when you're telling someone's life story. Also (and here's the *SPOILER*) unless there is irrefutable proof that Hank Garland's wife was getting banged doggie-style in front of a bunch of record executives, that kind of vulgarity should NEVER have been a part of this film. For lands sakes, their kids are still living, and - even if it were true - it really brings this film into the toilet to be so graphic about infidelity. It would be plenty to say she cheated. There are a million and one ways to even let the viewer know she made some kind of performance out of it (if she really did) but showing it this way and the subsequent inference that she was in cahoots with people who tried to kill her husband goes WAY outside the bounds of "creative license." There was never any suggestion (in real life) that Garland's car accident was anything but an accident in the news. If the film wants to entertain a possibility of criminal activity, they sure as heck should not drag Mrs. Garland into it.
I enjoyed the music, but the Elvis scenes are pretty cut-and-paste with an Elvis imitator that verges on parody. The instrumentals are uniformly fantastic, while the vocals are not true to their time period, employing a style of singing and playing that reeks of 2004, but is still good music - Just not 1955-1962 music. Set design is pretty, but a little too obvious in a showroom kind of way in all but the last scenes. The rooms don't feel lived in as much as displayed. The exterior shots were well done, except for a lack of other-than-classic, mint condition vintage cars, and the costuming captured the period well. The story itself - even to succeed as a fictional account - needs much sharper editing. There's a real drag to some of the scenes and a morose tone that plays like a funeral dirge. The scenes with the band members and a couple that Payne carries mostly on his own give this some life, but there are some fragmented story lines of characters we get to know enough to wonder about, but that are never resolved, yet a complete lack of reference to anything happening in the rest of the world (and these were some pretty tumultuous years).
I wanted to like this film. I'm a fan of both Waylon Payne and Hank Garland, and I think they both deserved better writing.
I enjoyed the music, but the Elvis scenes are pretty cut-and-paste with an Elvis imitator that verges on parody. The instrumentals are uniformly fantastic, while the vocals are not true to their time period, employing a style of singing and playing that reeks of 2004, but is still good music - Just not 1955-1962 music. Set design is pretty, but a little too obvious in a showroom kind of way in all but the last scenes. The rooms don't feel lived in as much as displayed. The exterior shots were well done, except for a lack of other-than-classic, mint condition vintage cars, and the costuming captured the period well. The story itself - even to succeed as a fictional account - needs much sharper editing. There's a real drag to some of the scenes and a morose tone that plays like a funeral dirge. The scenes with the band members and a couple that Payne carries mostly on his own give this some life, but there are some fragmented story lines of characters we get to know enough to wonder about, but that are never resolved, yet a complete lack of reference to anything happening in the rest of the world (and these were some pretty tumultuous years).
I wanted to like this film. I'm a fan of both Waylon Payne and Hank Garland, and I think they both deserved better writing.