Tom Hiddleston delivers a superb performance as short-lived country-music titan Hank Williams in I Saw the Light. The transformation is astonishing: before our eyes, a British actor known for playing devious and/or suave characters becomes an intense, jovial, and wiry son of Alabama, sweatily singing of his aching heart under a wide-brimmed hat. Emphasis on singing, which the actor does himself and very well, charging through such cuts as "Lovesick Blues" and "Hey, Good Lookin'" with twangy authenticity and buoyancy. Elizabeth Olsen is very fine, too, as Williams' first wife, Audrey, whose ambition to join her husband onstage and on record is complicated by her relatively mediocre voice and a growing tension in their relationship regarding his alcoholism and womanizing. Unfortunately, both turns are squandered in a rather disjointed and dull biopic which, in a curious way, exhibits minimal interest in Williams the man and musician: his influential flair for composition, the lyricism which partly gave birth to modern country music, is almost entirely ignored, and there is a perfunctory quality to the way the film moves through the rise-and-fall/booze-and-sex clichés parodied in Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story. The poor structure verges on garish at points: consider how a peripheral record executive played by Bradley Whitford pops up at random intervals to explain a shift in career trajectory or underline a point (via faux-confessional interview footage). It would be surprising if these expository interludes were not inserted at a late stage to conceal absent transitions and gaps in the storytelling. The lead performances, though, maintain interest and linger in the mind.

C+