Coal Miner's Daughter

A thoroughly engaging version of country singer Loretta Lynn's autobiography. Sissy Spacek excels as Lynn and is assisted by two superior performances. Certain to be one of the year's best films.

The rare expert film bio. Coal Miner's Daughter features an Oscar-winning performance by Sissy Spacek as country music queen Loretta Lynn. Masterfully directed by Michael Apted, the film traces the famed country singer's life from her beginnings in a tumbledown shack in Butcher Hollow, Kentucky, through her huge success, marital discord, and battle with prescription drugs.

Wonderful performances anchor this biopic of country star Loretta Lynn's rise to fame. In a time before the TV music channels made star biographies into such a formulaic joke, Coal Miner's Daughter was the real deal.

For all the modern gloss, what with poverty and nervous breakdowns it's still highly conventional stuff, but lovingly constructed to produce unremarkable but heart-warming entertainment.

A thoughtful, endearing film charting the life of singer Loretta Lynn from the depths of poverty in rural Kentucky to her eventual rise to the title of 'queen of country music'. Thanks in large part to superb performances by Sissy Spacek and Tommy Lee Jones, film [based on Lynn's autobiography, with George Vescey] mostly avoids the sudsy atmosphere common to many showbiz tales.

It's warm, entertaining, funny, and centered around that great Sissy Spacek performance, but it's essentially pretty familiar material (not that Loretta Lynn can be blamed that Horatio Alger wrote her life before she lived it). The movie isn't great art, but it has been made with great taste and style; it's more intelligent and observant than movie biographies of singing stars used to be. That makes it a treasure to watch, even if we sometimes have the feeling we've seen it before.

Like "Agatha" and the rock drama "Stardust," other movies of Mr. Apted's, Coal Miner's Daughter does a better job of setting its scenes than of telling a story. Its characterizations and its atmosphere work better than the action, which becomes shapeless and, in the manner of biographies of living subjects, slightly cramped by its good intentions.

For better or worse, it's the platonic ideal of the Hollywood musical/biopic — terrific, award-worthy performances and incredibly problematic depictions of events that may or may not have even happened. I guess I'm not really sure what the angle is here at the end of the day. Am I supposed to despise the Tommy Lee Jones character as the violent, sociopathic groomer that he is? Or do I just "take the good with the bad" and accept that, even with all his faults, this is a person who shaped the figure in question? It's not exactly clear and I feel like it kinda should be when you have a character as allegedly flawed as Doolittle Lynn was. With that, should I also consider throwing a good portion of those concerns to the wayside in the face of some recent revelations regarding the material this film was based on? Yeah, I guess there's been some doubts cast on the veracity of the autobiography at the center of things here, with some of the more salacious allegations drawing skepticism in particular. All the more reason for me to check out on movies with as much baggage as this. Again, great acting and even better singing. Just a little too icky when it comes to most of the intangibles.