Crazy Heart: R: language, brief sexuality; 1:51; $ $ $ $ (out of $5)

At the Critics Choice Movie Awards, Best Actor winner Jeff Bridges told the Hollywood Palladium crowd (and a VH1 cable audience) that “Crazy Heart” writer/director Scott Cooper never even helmed a home movie till now. Well, the 40-year-old Virginian must have one hellacious future since his debut behind the camera absolutely gets all the right country-western juices flowing in a story based on a 20-year-old novel by Thomas Cobb.

Certainly, the Oscar-likely performance from Bridges is key, as this good-natured vet plays a down-on-his-luck singer named Bad Blake. (Think Merle Haggard in his worst days as one of the aptly named Outlaws.) The ornery ol’ dude likes booze and babes better than just ’bout anything but a-pickin’ and a-grinnin’ in all the right places.

Right now, however, those venues include bowling-alley lounges and any other dive that might pay the former C&W superstar to perform between — and even during — his non-stop binges.

Enter good-lookin’ Tommy Sweet (Colin Farrell), a former Blake protege now on top of the concert heap but very willing to help out his mentor with a bigtime opening-act gig or two. The question: Will the “Bad” man’s pride allow him to accept the extended hand, not to mention the counsel of a best friend? (That good buddy is played by “producer” Robert Duvall, who won his own Academy Award for a similar “Tender Mercies” gig years ago.) None of the answers will surprise anyone, but Cooper’s telling and Bridges’s rivetingly authentic portrayal nicely manage to make it all work.

One more good thing: Please give Maggie Gyllenhaal a chance to play Blake’s love interest. Admittedly, when she first walked into view, I’m pretty sure I visibly cringed, wanting no part of the seemingly ridiculous age difference between Maggie’s intelligent single mom and her scruffy, belligerent leading man.

Know what? Gyllenhaal grows into our hearts as easily as she does into the May-December screen relationship with the accomplished Bridges. Throw in a perfectly appropriate score from the legendary T-Bone Burnett, including an already award-winning Best Song by Ryan Bingham (“The Weary Kind”), and it looks as if this guy Cooper, himself a former actor, will have his own extremely tough act to follow.

Read more by John M. Urbancich at http://jmuvies.blogspot.com/