I Saw the Light

Refus­ing to take a leaf out of the book of its worka­holic, 11-mil­lion sell­ing coun­try trou­ba­dour sub­ject, Marc Abraham’s I Saw the Light is a defi­ant­ly uncom­mer­cial take on the life a times of Hank Williams. He was a hell­rais­er with a glint in his eye who, if lead­ing man Tom Hid­dle­ston is to be believed, also had the broad­est beam­ing smile on the cir­cuit. At one point, Williams’ slide gui­tar play­er bemoans that the songs they play – three-chord dit­ties that exist to please the mass­es – are too basic, and what Abra­ham has done in response is pro­duce a very sim­ple, straight, three-chord biopic which (unlike Hank’s music) avoids sen­ti­men­tal­i­ty and trite romanticism.

The film takes place dur­ing the ​’40s and ​’50s, in and around the south­ern states, most­ly Alaba­ma and Nashville. It is built up of pri­vate episodes and a few hip-shuf­fling live per­for­mances, fused togeth­er via lan­guid cross­fades and large­ly shorn of expo­si­tion. Hiddleston’s per­for­mance is high­ly enter­tain­ing, cap­tur­ing Williams as a lanky, charis­mat­ic sweet­heart. He doesn’t wants you to love or hate his ol’ Hank. He sim­ply demands that you empathise with him, to see that while he did some things which might seem cow­ard­ly and obnox­ious, he remained some­thing of an inno­cent – that he made deci­sions with­out the mind­set of a hay­seed philosopher.

The musi­cal per­for­mances are superb, with Hid­dle­ston even nail­ing the famous segues into Appalachi­an yodel­ling that form the bridges of chart hits like ​‘Lovesick Blues’. Williams’ var­i­ous bouts of ill­ness, much of it due to his drink­ing, but also his wors­en­ing spina bifi­da, are nev­er used as a rea­son to jus­ti­fy his actions. The film under­stands that it must have been deeply trou­bling – both phys­i­cal­ly and psy­cho­log­i­cal­ly – to have to shoul­der these con­di­tions. But he did so as best he could and it affect­ed his char­ac­ter rather than ful­ly shap­ing it.