When a young relative goes missing, a jaded former country star returns to the industry that chewed her up in 'Country Strong' director Shana Feste's thriller, which can be gaudy fun, but eventually peters out.
Misty Jones keeps her Grammy in the fridge, alongside a near-empty Tupperware of chicken broth and, well, not a whole lot else: A former country superstar turned burnt-out rural hermit, she more or less lives off what once was, but her memories don’t exactly nourish her. Peculiar details like these enliven “Heartland,” a missing-person mystery that returns writer-director Shana Feste to the Nashville milieu of her 2010 sophomore feature “Country Strong.” So does Jessica Chastain‘s surprisingly brash, beery performance as Misty, whose no-bullshit demeanor serves her well when she must turn amateur detective, investigating the disappearance of a relative who happens to be a rising country star herself.
Fusing Southern-fried noir atmospherics with the sequinned kitsch of a Music City backstage melodrama, “Heartland” often hits the same undemanding guilty-pleasure groove as “Country Strong” — or indeed the six-season run of TV’s “Nashville” in the 2010s. What it isn’t, at nearly any point, is an effective thriller. Feste’s thin screenplay is heavily reliant on Chastain’s brio to sustain a quest that only narrowly makes sense on a moment-to-moment basis, and never gathers much intrigue — since the villains are all glaringly identifiable as such from the get-go, while Misty’s rough-diamond integrity is never in doubt. The result is diverting straight-to-Netflix fare, sparkly and disposable as a rhinestone, though its star commits as though it were something more.
“There’s no such thing as good girls,” says Misty early on in proceedings. It’s not entirely true — the character hides a kind, true heart beneath a gruffly embittered exterior — but it’s a solid pointer for Chastain, always at her most interesting when playing characters who are either morally off-base (“Dreams,” “A Most Violent Year”) or at least a little prickly and defensive. And she comes out, quite literally, all guns blazing: In the film’s opening minutes, she feuds with a neighbor on the remote Georgia pecan farm where she’s settled, eventually taking a shotgun to the woman’s windows. It’s our first taste of the hot temper that cost her a mainstream music career years ago — they called her “the cunt of country,” she says with some relish — though she rarely wields it against someone who doesn’t deserve it.
It’s that hard-headed quality that her brother Donny (Paul Sparks) calls upon when he comes to her for help. His 20-something daughter Charlie (singer Carter Faith, in her film debut), herself a buzzy new talent on the Nashville country scene, has recently gone missing, and he suspects shady showbiz machinations at play — something Misty knows plenty about, even if she left that world behind long ago. And so she turns gumshoe, with an oversize felt Stetson instead of a fedora, and a lineup of men to question that range from Charlie’s too-slick-by-half manager Roy (Garrett Hedlund) to an obsessed incel stalker.
There are other, hidden reasons for Misty to take on a job that isn’t really in her skill set, though they’re not quite satisfyingly addressed, as Feste’s script toggles awkwardly between the procedural and the personal. Certain key relationships — notably that between Misty and Donny, brittle with shared secrets — are fleshed out in single scenes, never to be readdressed; elsewhere, the film dawdles on less pivotal connections, though there’s a lovely, wily supporting performance from Sugarland frontwoman Jennifer Nettles as a past friend-turned-rival, culminating in an onstage duet between her and Chastain that’s the highlight of the film’s original and on-the-money country song score. Where characters are sketchily drawn, casting is often more considered: Stalwarts like Hedlund, John Hawkes and Norbert Leo Butz all bring flickers of intelligence and eccentricity to fleeting or one-dimensional roles.
Still, this is Chastain’s show, and she’s clearly enjoying it, often daring to play things quite broad and blustery, which rather suits the occasional tackiness of the material; at other points, she convincingly locates a quiet seam of deep-set pain in the protagonist, a casualty of an industry that, it is suggested here, often takes young female talent for a ride. Misty seems vaguely inspired by the enduring mystique of Bobbie Gentry, the prodigious Nashville singer-songwriter who, after a few years at the top, retired from music and checked out of the public eye entirely. Yet the film’s somewhat half-baked mystery tends to distract us from more dramatically probing questions about Misty herself, a curious character in search of a more curious character study.
