Hollywood loves an addicted, over-the-hill any body—former wrestlers and actors, teachers, astronauts or down-and-out singers well past their prime. Hollywood loves ’em so bad they don’t even have to seek redemption, or find it. They just have to be .

As an audience, we also have our guilty little pleasures. We love watching fame and fortune up there on the silver screen, but we love its aftermath even more so. Oh, how we appreciate a good crash and burn.

Jeff Bridges knows how to crash and burn. He can play love lost, bone broke and dead drunk better than probably anybody. Put Bridges, a quart of whiskey and an old guitar in a $12-a-night hotel room and what happens? Magic, as it turns out.

In “Crazy Heart” Bridges plays Bad Blake, a renegade country western singer, once a star but now reduced to performing in bowling alleys and beer joints along those lonely highways between Texas and New Mexico.

He pretty much drinks his way through the long drives and the sleepless nights, grumbling to his manager by pay phone but too broke to refuse any one-night stand. Part Waylon Jennings and part Jeff Bridges, Bad Blake’s not a bad sort, just a burned-out talent with nowhere else to go.

Adding insult to injury is Tommy Sweet (Colin Farrell), an old protégé of Blake’s who’s hit the big time, offering Blake money to write new material, to open for him and his sold-out arena performances.

But the bottle’s killed both Blake’s song-writing ability and his fondness for Sweet; he gets by on fading memories, singing the old stuff one honky-tonk at a time.

What keeps “Crazy Heart” going—what keeps its characterrich, whiskey-saturated heart pumping, is the utter honesty at play throughout the film. Blake’s never missed a performance, and he doesn’t miss any here.

You’d expect more than a few melodramatic thunderclaps in a film like “Crazy Heart,” but you won’t find a stereotypical bone in Bad Blake’s body. Sure, the story may have been around the block more than once, but Blake’s an original. Not long into the film you realize that “Crazy Heart’s” left all those broken-down cowboy clichés back at the ranch.

After one boozy performance, Blake meets Jean Craddock (Maggie Gyllenhaal), a smalltown journalist and overprotective single mom. Even though they seem to have little in common, the two hit it off.

I will admit to a momentary reluctance in accepting perky young Jean’s entering Blake’s life.

I will even admit to being briefly perplexed over the ease at which Blake and Jean find comfort in each other’s company. A flaw in the script after all? That inescapable cliché? Or perhaps something else. . . .

I mention this because Jean (and Gyllenhaal has rarely been better) is the film’s unexpected wild card. We’ve been made so aware of Blake’s in-your-face failings that the suspiciously perfect Jean appears doomed for little more than heartache.

But the tragic, understated beauty of “Crazy Heart” comes with the realization that Jean’s just as damaged as Bad Blake. It’s a brilliant little piece of cinematic shuffle.

Yeah, we might have come to hear Bad Blake sing, but the song couldn’t haven’t been written without Jean and—well, if you see the film, you’ll know what I mean. I wish we had time to understand Jean a little better, but this is Blake’s story after all . . . and rightfully so.

Colin Farrell (who’s traded in his “In Bruges” brogue for a bona fide country twang) does a nice job as superstar Tommy Sweet.

There’s another presence at play in “Crazy Heart” as well, one that’s essential to the film. Bad Blake could not have been “Crazy Heart” without the undulating current of the music he sings.

Written by co-producer TBone Burnett, the music is as much the man as the man is the music.

When Blake sings of lost love and troubled times, you believe him and you understand him and you know it’s real.