According to Bad Blake, the fading country-and-Western star in Crazy Heart, a song is good if you think you’ve heard it before when you listen to it the first time. This philosophy seems to be shared by Scott Cooper, who wrote, produced, and directed this adaptation of Thomas Cobb’s novel. It’s less an aesthetic principle than a prescription for playing it safe; but there are certain tunes that play again and again, and the redemption of the down-and-out country crooner always hits that “truthful” note—because in honky-tonk, it’s never auto-tuned.

Bad—who, at 57, leaves his belt unbuckled and putters between gigs at bowling alleys in a ’78 Suburban—is about as “authentic” as they come. He’s a little testy about being outmoded by superstars like Tommy Sweet (Colin Farrell)—a former protégé—but Bad’s temper isn’t akin to his stage name. His anger at leaving four ex-wives and a son behind, and his obstinance about making a comeback—which would be a Sweet deal—boomerang at him in unlimited refills of bourbon and unending cartons of smokes. Everybody’s good to Bad but Bad. There’s only one real surprise in the plot—and it’s farfetched enough that it doesn’t feel quite earned—but the plot isn’t what critics and award-bearers have set their sights on.

Enter Jeff Bridges, who makes Bad look good. If Bridges isn’t as flamboyant as other actors of his generation (Pacino, Streep, De Niro, Hoffman, et al), it’s because he doesn’t enter his characters through their pores; he holds them tight, snuggles them—he’s a protective, sentimental actor in the best sense. And his innate combination of skill, generosity, gentleness, and humor is intensely ingratiating. (Even when he played a villain, in Iron Man, his likability couldn’t be subverted.) Sentimentality can be physically demanding. Bad looks like a bristly yeti, but what country singer of his mold hasn’t grown a little mold? Bridges suggests a man who’s given in to the fungus. Poetry punches through fungus, and Bridges’s emotional range is poetic.

Maggie Gyllenhaal plays the small-time reporter who helps Bad see the light at the end of the bottle; she’s the one who finally scrapes the grime off Bad’s Chia head. The journalist says that she blushes easily because her capillaries are close to the skin. Everything this woman feels is close to her skin, and the movie overemphasizes her vulnerability. (In one scene, she breaks down after Bad composes lyrics on her bed. She feels unworthy of his talent, and mawkishly assumes that he’ll forget her.) And yet, Gyllenhaal’s eccentricity—her movements are sinuous, like a love-struck stoner’s—suggests that layers of complexity have been battered inward. Her effervescent performance gets at something that the movie itself doesn’t quite.

But, within its limited framework, Crazy Heart is a competent, likable film. There’s some zing to the dialogue, and—since T-Bone Burnett served as Bad’s lyricist—an air of authenticity about the score. (Bad’s repertoire indeed reminds me of music I’ve heard before—even Bridges’s sonorous voice.) Cooper doesn’t get as much out of the Southwestern landscapes as I might have liked; the bounteous mesas authorize natives like Bad to indulge in their freedom to self-destruct. But there’s at least one shot that’s been burned into my hippocampus: Bad, sharp and recumbent in the foreground, with the chintzy Christmas lights of a dive forming a blurry constellation behind him. It seems to capture the romance in the rundown, the fleeting perks of the peripatetic barfly. (Bad’s touring life is both Up in the Air in economy class and a domestication of The Wrestler.) Contrast this shot with one of Robert Duvall—as Bad’s loudmouth bartender/cheerleader/buddy—spouting off life-goes-on lyrics in a rowboat, as the camera pulls back, bestowing meaning from above. [Yawns.] But even if Cooper’s circulatory-system lunacy is hardly in evidence, he has a knack for bringing out the heart murmurs of others.