Jeff Bridges gives a powerful performance, a great portrayal, not just of a failing country music artist, but of an alcoholic.

Alcohol, it is not commonly known,  chiefly blocks emotional intelligence, not intellectual intelligence.  The alcoholic over time doesn’t know what makes him sad, what makes him happy, what makes him anxious.  And we have these emotions for a reason.  They teach us what matters to us, what frightens us, what causes satisfaction.  The neurologist, Antonio Damasio, in the book  Descartes’ Error, descirbes how loss of emotional processing leads to profound dysfunction.  The alcoholic, without this learning, becomes a baffling mixture of preserved intellectual intelligence but increasing emotional stupidity.  This is Bad Blake, a man of talent and creativity who abandons a son and a wife, and doesn’t know why.

We often see alcoholism almost as a charming by-product of creative  genius.  We think of it as enhancing creative powers.  We are encouraged to see it as a movingly tragic antidote for gifted peoples’ special pain.  This movie, though, gives us none of that.  Bad Blake was bad because he was a alcoholic, and he became sensible, and creative when he stopped drinking.  His girl friend didn’t waver when she saw it clearly. Somehow, she had learned that alcohol can’t be trusted, and she wasn’t going to risk the welfare of her son.

In American Prometheus, The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, we find the unacknowledged, but clearly portrayed, martini alcoholism of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the famous maker of the atom bomb.  We see that his wife was an alcoholic also.   Oppenheimer, too, became a frustrating, puzzling mixture of mental genius and emotional failure. His daughter committed suicide, unable to live with the paucity of emotional regard from her parents.

Alcohol, in some people,  causes alcoholism, and makes them emotional failures.  Crazy Heart rings true.