To be released tomorrow on DVD: "Crazy Heart"

Grade: A
Crazy Heart, written and directed by Scott Cooper, is a small movie perfectly scaled to the big performance at its center. It offers some picturesque views of out-of-the-way parts of the American West, but the dominant feature of its landscape is Bad Blake, a wayward, aging country singer played by Jeff Bridges.

Those last four words should be sufficient recommendation. Some of Bridges’s peers may have burned more intensely in their prime, but very few American actors over the past 35 years have flickered and smoldered with such craft and resilience. Neither blandly likable nor operatically emotional, this actor has a sly kind of charisma and a casual intelligence. You suspect that he may be smarter than some of the characters he plays — the lounge musician in The Fabulous Baker Boys, the deadbeat bowler in The Big Lebowski, the egotistical author in The Door in the Floor, to take just a few examples — but also that he knows every corner and shadow of each one’s mind.

Unlike Bridges, Bad, who is 57, seems to be running on the last fumes of his talent. He drives from one gig to another in a battered truck, playing bowling alleys and bars with local pickup bands and sleeping in less-than-deluxe accommodations. He smokes and drinks as if trying to settle a long-ago bet between his liver and his lungs about which he would destroy first. The chorus to his signature song (one of several written especially for Bridges) observes that “falling feels like flying, for a little while.” That time has long since passed for Bad, who is scraping the bottom and trying not to complain too much about it (except when he can get his agent on the phone).

Drinking, cheating, love gone wrong — a lot of country music expresses the weary stoicism of self-inflicted defeat. Loss and abjection are two of the chords that define the genre. A third is redemption, which has also been a theme of modest, regionally inflected American independent cinema for quite some time. So even before Maggie Gyllenhaal shows up as Jean, a New Mexico journalist with a cute young son and some disappointments of her own, you can be pretty sure that you’re in for yet another drama of second chances and late-breaking epiphanies.

But no one ever put on a country record in search of novelty or wild surprise. What you seek in those songs is honest feeling and musical skill. Even in decline, Bad has both of those things, and enough professionalism to keep complete self-destruction at bay. Performing in front of a small, appreciative crowd in Colorado, he strikes up an old hit and then hands the song off to the band so he can run offstage and vomit in the parking lot, returning just in time to sing the final chorus and make eye contact with the groupie he’ll wake up with the next morning.

What does Jean see in this wreck? Bridges, settling into Cooper’s understated script as if he’d written it himself, makes the answer both obvious and a little enigmatic. There is a playboy’s charm and an old-fashioned Southern courtliness half-hidden behind the weariness, the anger at squandered possibilities, the flabby gut and the unkempt beard. This fellow may be bad, but he’s also dignified.

Bad’s own songs express this tension, as do other selections on the soundtrack (overseen by T Bone Burnett), which help to establish this fictional musician’s place in the actual musical universe. His main connection to the current country scene is Tommy Sweet (Colin Farrell), a former protégé who has hit the big time and whose support Bad both desperately wants and is sometimes too proud to accept. Tommy is part of a slick new breed that pays respect to the stalwarts of the past (as any good country singer must), but whose smoothness nonetheless gets under the skin of his sandpapery former mentor.

In his first interview with Jean, Bad pays the expected homage to precursors like Hank Williams and Lefty Frizzell, but really he belongs in more recent, somewhat rougher company. Bad’s home — when he’s there — is in Houston, and the voices that accompany his comings and goings are mostly drawn from the outlaws and renegades associated with Texas in the era of his early manhood. You hear songs by Townes van Zandt and Waylon Jennings, and you may also think of Willie Nelson and some others. As for Bridges: he can’t help it if he looks like Kris Kristofferson and sounds a little like David Allan Coe.

When Robert Duvall (a producer of Crazy Heart) turns up as one of Bad’s old friends, you might also remember Mac Sledge, the Bad Blake figure he played in Bruce Beresford’s 1983 film, Tender Mercies. Cooper’s movie owes an obvious debt to that one, but there can never be too many songs about drinking, loving and feeling bad, and there is always room for another version of that old song about the guy who messed it all up and kept on going. Especially when that guy can play the tune as truly and as well as Bridges.