Sweet Dreams

Reisz's film concentrates almost exclusively on the ups and downs of Patsy Cline's painful marriage to the aptly named Charlie Dick (Harris). In outline, this is the stuff of soap opera - rags to celebrity plane crash via grievous bodily harm - but of a superior kind. The two main performances are excellent: Lange plays the singer without a hint of condescension to her dreams of 'a big house with yellow roses', while Harris is persuasively menacing, with an inventively foul mouth. And Reisz studiously avoids any of those crashingly neat life/lyric juxtapositions until the very end, by which time even the most hardened palenecks should be sobbing into their beer.