"A man sings a sad song he knows is sad." Hank Williams (Hiddleston) is a country music legend. He has sung and written some of the best song in this and any genre. He also had some demons that destroyed him. Pain and hurt that he felt and caused led to his classic body of work, and ultimately his untimely death. This is a very hard movie to review. After the huge success of Ray and Walk The Line it is a tall order to live up to those two. I wondered why this didn't get a big release, especially considering the Avengers connection. After watching this I can see why. The acting is great. Hiddleston embodies Hank and even does his own singing. Olsen does a spot on job as Audrey and portraying the struggles she went through. The music and performances are a treat to watch. All that said, the movie itself came off as flat and a little uninspired. It was missing something that the other two had and it ultimately ended up hurting the movie and making this a huge disappointment, for me at least. Overall, great acting could not overcome the bad writing. Worth seeing, but temper your expectations. I sadly give this a B-.

Country singer and songwriter Hank Willims achieves success, but has ongoing battles with alcoholism, substance abuse, womanising, his wife, and disease.

Tom Hiddleston stars as Williams, and in him lies the film's main strength and also weakness. It is a good performance, with Hiddleston showing considerable musical chops (the number against which the opening titles are shown is simply stunning),but at its heart is Hiddleston's innate likability. Willims had to be likable on stage and on radio, but I strongly suspect – and the events of the film bear it out – that he wasn't that likable when out of the public eye, yet he always seems likable here, whether drunk, womanising or generally being a bad husband. For that reason, I'm not sure that we saw a fair portrait of the artist.

The period detail is good, the music is presented well, and Elizabeth Olsen as wife Audrey is (as usual) wonderful. There were times when the dialogue was either lost in the mix or incomprehensible to a non-Southerner, but not to the extent that I couldn't follow it.

It's an enjoyable film (especially if you don't know much about Williams, as I didn't),but it may not be as true as one might wish.

Hank Williams (Tom Hiddleston) marries recently divorced single mom Audrey (Elizabeth Olsen) in 1944 in an Alabama gas station. He's a hard drinking country singer with some small success. She starts singing with him despite objections from the band and his mother (Cherry Jones). Audrey's constant calling gets Fred Rose (Bradley Whitford) to sign them. They stop Audrey's singing as Hank strives to perform in the Opry. His constant back pains leading to alcohol and pain killer use is finally diagnosed as chronic spina bifida occulta. After his divorce from Audrey, he has a brief affair with Bobbi Jett resulting in a daughter. He meets teenager Billie Jean Jones (Maddie Hasson) and later marries her. He would die on January 1, 1953.

There is nothing substantive here. One would be better off to listen to Hank Williams music while watching a documentary about his life. It's very thin and I'm not talking about Hiddleston's physicality. One rarely gets a sense of the man or his marriage. There is no tension. There is no sense of his life or his work. His struggle with his back and alcohol is the obvious path but the movie doesn't elevate his pain. This is a waste of perfectly good talents. I laid all the blame on Marc Abraham who is more a producer than a writer or director.