Just like a country song: sappy enough to get your toes curling, catchy enough to get your head bobbing, and vague enough to lose track of what the song’s about. Country Strong’s subpar storyline sags below the support of the movie’s (country)strong cast and catchy soundtrack. In a theater filled with Tim McGraw fans and 95.3 KRTY listeners, naturally all country goes, and writer/director Shana Feste does not hold back, flailing the audience into a country music whirlwind.

For actor Garrett Hedlund, the role of Beau Hutton stretches far beyond his recent hyper-tech character from Tron, Sam Flynn. But Hedlund stays true to his angst-y—introverted—heartthrob persona, playing the role of a small-town country singer passionate about his music. Along with his night job of performing his music at local pubs, Beau also holds a job at a rehab center where he happens to meet and develop a relationship with Grammy-winning country singer Kelly Canter (Gwyenth Paltrow).

Paltrow morphs into her superstar character, sporting a newfound accent, wardrobe, and sassy southern edge. Her performance as Kelly has the audience completely attune with the character’s thoughts, enough to be able to foresee Kelly’s final decision; however, her image as country’s sweetheart is challenged by pageant-princess Chiles Stanton (Leighton Meester). Far from the Upper East Side of Blair Waldorf, Chiles is on the road to fame, but choking in the limelight. Kelly’s husband James (Tim McGraw) pairs up Chiles and Beau to open for Kelly’s new tour, creating a teeter-totter of romance as Beau alters from one singer to the other. Meanwhile, James and Kelly struggle with repairing their lost love after a musical catastrophe intervened with their family’s future.

Feste seems to be playing around with the idea of implication, as she fails to explicitly explain the romances as well as the events leading up to them. This ambiguity keeps the viewers from completely immersing themselves in the plot. Rather than developing the romance between Beau and Kelly and later romances as well, she instead throws the viewers into the middle of it without ever formally conveying what in fact “it” is. She also never fully explains what Kelly is doing in rehab nor what actually “happened in Dallas” until the film is near an end. While in some movies this uncertainty adds to an artistic liberty, in Country Strong it is simply unclear. Overall, this heart-wrenching drama is a solid O.K.

Rating: 3.5/5 stars