You won't be disappointed!

I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

With the same title as a song written by him, this film chronicles the turbulent life of country/western singer/songwriter Hank Williams. The plot spans the late 40s and early 50s, when he was most popular. Terrific costumes and prod design for that historical era contribute to realistic visuals, as does the cinematography, a blend of B&W, color, and sepia. Many interior scenes convey a dimly lit, drab atmosphere, common in post Great Depression America.The major problem here is the script. Too much time is spent on his stormy marriage to wife Audrey; this theme repeats over and over. As a result the film's tone trends toward anger. The tone needed to reflect melancholy. Moreover, the strongest scenes are right at the end, the funeral, which needed to be at the very beginning to set the stage for a life beset by difficulty and depression. The ending then could have been an expanded version of the last few hours of his life and subsequent funeral.In addition, there's a tendency to insert filler scenes into the plot that, although factual, were tangential to his onstage performances and his many burdens. The long segment of his and Audrey's reconciliation at a rural home, the B&W movie reel, the Dory Sherry interview, the bird dog hunting are examples of plot segments that could have been excised from the film.Acting, both by Tom Hiddleston as Hank and Elizabeth Olsen as Audrey, is acceptable. But having Hiddleston lip sync Williams' songs might have worked better.The film's poor public reception may relate less to the film's plot problems than to the subject matter. Time moves on. Perhaps a modern audience no longer feels that the life of a county/western singer from 65+ years ago would be relevant.Yet, for Hank Williams fans, like me, the film is worth watching at least once. His music is frozen in time, the songs being expressions of sadness and heartache that were common among the common man and woman during a period in American history that had not yet fully recovered from the Great Depression.

Frustrating. That is how I would describe this unfocused and sadly unengaging biopic of legendary country singer Hank Williams, the man responsible for such memorable ditties as What You Got Cooking and Cold Cold Heart.At one time or another spoken about as being a likely contender at the Academy Awards, Marc Abraham's film that features an outstanding and deservedly acknowledged performance from British superstar Tom Hiddleston, I Saw the Light became a true non-event upon release around the world, making a paltry $1.6 million at the worldwide box office and a fate even worse here in Australia where it has been dumped straight onto home release without even the slightest bit of fanfare around, which is such a shame considering the material and tools at Abraham's disposal.William's story from that centres on an incredible rise to fame from a relatively sad upbringing is completely mishandled by Abraham with the film rarely, if ever, offering up much lead in or background to Williams bar an impressive meltdown at a music festival where Williams addresses the crowd under extreme duress. It's nigh on infuriating that we're never really allowed inside this talented performers mindset or history and makes the film feel as though it's at arm's length away at all times.This feeling of disconnect can be laid almost entirely to blame on Abraham as Hiddleston who has still perhaps been at his best as Loki in The Avengers before this film rather than the over praised Only Lovers Left Alive, The Deep Blue Sea and the overrated BBC series The Night Manager makes this role his own from the word go.As the camera slowly lingers in towards Hiddleston performing an impressive instrument free rendition (Hiddleston performs all his own songs here as well as playing the guitar) of hit William's song Cold Cold Heart to an intently concentrating audience, you forget that you're watching the British actor and feel as though you're instead witnessing the complete re-embodying of Williams. It's a turn that deserves a much better movie even if he gets solid support from Elizabeth Olsen as William's long suffering love Audrey.I Saw the Light is a real missed opportunity to not only tell the story of Williams but give Hiddleston the film his performance deserved and while the die-hard fans of Williams may find this film better than us Williams outsiders, it would be very hard to find many other reasons to watch this soulless film other than to see Hiddleston deliver the acting turn of his career so far.2 electric garage door buttons out of 5

I am very disappointed by this movie. I gave it 5 stars because of the performances and production values, which were both very good. Tom Hiddleston, of which I am a fan, delivers a great performance, as he usually does, and it was a pleasure to hear him sing. He seems to have put a lot of effort to put himself into the character, and I salute that. Elisabeth Olsen, as Audrey Williams, is also excellent.However, the movie itself is extremely bland. Even a film based on real life events needs to have a story arc in order to engage the viewers. There's factual, and then there's boring. There was no story in this movie, just (sometimes very) short sequences from Williams' life in chronological order. The first half of the movie was particularly jarring, as we moved from one event to another, without time to feel the impact of one scene before the next arrived. I'm not calling for melodrama, but this first half was as engaging as a Wikipedia page. It did get slightly better in the second half.For a musical biopic, there was a surprising lack of focus on music. Sure, we were shown musical performances, but we weren't shown a lot of context around them, making them seem more decorative than part of the story told. Maybe the film was made only for aficionados who already know everything about the country & western music business from the 40's? I doubt it. My biggest disappointment is that, apart from making me listen to beautiful songs, this movie completely failed to show me how important Hank Williams is in the history of music. If I had never heard about him (and before this year, I had never heard about him), I would be baffled as to why they felt it was important to make a movie about him.I could understand their choice to focus more on Williams' personal life, if they had made it interesting to me. But the movie is as unemotional as they could have made it. The direction is so detached that I sometimes felt like I was watching some sort of existential comedy, a la Coen brothers. Maybe I'm slightly exaggerating, but I did laugh at some scenes that I don't feel were supposed to be funny. I could not be invested emotionally at all, with the exception of a very few scenes. I really blame the direction here, because the actors did give emotional performances. It just seemed that the director didn't want us to feel any empathy for anyone.

The only thing which made this dreary movie bearable was Tom Hiddleston's singing. Why a great classical actor such as Hiddleston (Henry V in The Hollow Crown) found himself in this yawnfest is beyond comprehension. Where they should have had an exciting montage showing Hank Williams going from smoky sweaty honky tonks in the South to Grand ol' Oprey and beyond, performing one song after another, we got a dull flat cheating husband soap opera played out in tacky motel rooms. Compared with the Johnny Cash biopic I Walk the Line, this was a waste of money and the waste of time spent watching it. The film had a budget TV movie feel with the major sets being outside the front door of William's home and a budget hotel room, which appeared to be the same one throughout. Even the scenes of meetings consisted of a man sitting behind a desk face by one or two others and little movement. The long farewell to his wife before he drove away to his unexpected death was excruciatingly corny.The lone star is Tom Hiddleston's singing, of which we heard far too little. I hope his career survives.