Metacritic reviews

Clearly the coal miner's daughter's cousin by both birthright and ambition, Sweet Dreams upholds the family honor quite well, with Jessica Lange's portrayal of country singer Patsy Cline certainly equal to Sissy Spacek's Oscar-winning recreation of Loretta Lynn.

Thrumming with the electric rapport between Jessica Lange and Ed Harris (and screen writer Robert Getchell's sparky dialogue), the movie's darn near irresistible.

What elevates these scenes from the usual concert simulations - and what gives the entire film its tremendous immediacy - is the extraordinary way in which Miss Lange has molded herself to fit the music. Although the performance is conspicuously prop-heavy, with brittle wigs and an enormous number of costume changes, Miss Lange makes herself a perfect physical extension of the vibrant, changeable, enormously expressive woman who can be heard on these recordings.

Jessica Lange plays the scrappy '60s singer with sweet ferocity.

In outline, this is the stuff of soap opera - rags to celebrity plane crash via grievous bodily harm - but of a superior kind. The two main performances are excellent: Lange plays the singer without a hint of condescension to her dreams of 'a big house with yellow roses', while Harris is persuasively menacing, with an inventively foul mouth.

Lange gets deep into these numbers, the sound and spirit of Patsy seeming to stream through her face, body and hands with the musical equivalent of that hunger for living. Hominy Harmonies: Lange's energy, sensuality and intelligence pump iron into Getchell's script, which doesn't have the bite and color of his "Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore." [7 Oct 1985, p.88]

Though compelling, well crafted, and well acted, SWEET DREAMS will probably be a disappointment for Patsy Cline fans.

Director Karel Reisz (The French Lieutenant's Woman) clearly doesn't trust the American audience's ability to handle mixed, emotionally complex tones (and by all the available evidence he's right not to), yet by segregating the feelings he wants to express he makes them seem artificial and programmatic. But the performances do have a redeeming vividness.

The point is: When Sweet Dreams' as it is now constructed, is over, we remember and are intrigued more by Charlie Dick than by Patsy Cline, played by Jessica Lange in a performance that comes up short when necessarily compared with Sissy Spacek`s tour de force as Loretta Lynn in ''Coal Miner`s Daughter.''

Sweet Dreams begins with more energy than it is able to sustain.