Scott Cooper's steel-town drama has an A-list cast and superb score, but its debts to The Deer Hunter outweigh its strengths

Actor-turned-director Scott Cooper's previous film, Crazy Heart, was a portrait of world-weary Americana boasting a terrifically grizzled performance by Jeff Bridges, and buoyed by an audience-friendly musicality that earned Ryan Bingham and T-Bone Burnett an Oscar for the tellingly entitled song The Weary Kind. This second directorial outing is altogether less mellifluous, although once again music provides a doorway into a world which may otherwise be impenetrably gruff. While Pearl Jam's Release may be the attention-grabbing theme bookending the drama, it's Dickon Hinchliffe's mournfully clanging score that sets the tone for this earnest tale of overwrought male bonding against an evocative backdrop of rust-belt desolation.

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