Can the British invasion of Hollywood get any more startling than this? Country music icon Hank Williams played by ... Tom Hiddleston? Maybe even now Eddie Redmayne is getting ready to play Elvis. It’s counterintuitive casting, to say the least, for this intensely American figure. My personal theory is that George W Bush could always count on some sentimental loyalty from the voters because he looked a bit like Hank Williams. Well, Hiddleston brings his focused and intelligent technique to bear on the role; the externals are plausible, the accent is fine and he does his own (very good) singing. There is something interesting in his every scene. But alongside him, Elizabeth Olsen – playing Hank’s first wife Audrey – looks natural and relaxed in a way Hiddleston never quite does. This is a long, baggy movie about Williams’s troubled life and career in the 1940s and 50s. It never really finds its shape, either as a conventional biopic or an intentionally mysterious scenes-from-a-life study. Williams gets drunk a lot, cheats on his wife, does drugs on the road, misses gigs and suffers from chronic back pain. Wives and girlfriends flit in and out of the action. Disappointingly, Olsen isn’t in it much, and her genuine rapport with Hiddleston isn’t developed. An interestingly acted curiosity.
