Kyle Eastwood co-stars with father Clint Eastwood Honkytonk Man, the Depression Era drama full of Nashville blues.
Free for you to view on Hulu.com: Honkytonk Man, a well-received Depression Era drama directed by and starring Clint Eastwood.
Eastwood plays Red Stovall, a hard-drinking and none-too-healthy country music singer who can’t stop pursuing his dream of stardom in Nashville. While on the road to Music City, he’s accompanied by his adoring young nephew, Whit (Kyle Eastwood, the star’s real-life son), and the two travelers wind up learning a lot from each other.
As Pultizer Prize-winning critic Roger Ebert wrote in his original review of the 1982 release: “This is a sweet, whimsical, low-key movie, a movie that makes you feel good without pressing you too hard. It provides Eastwood with a screen character who is the complete opposite of the patented Eastwood tough guys, and provides a role of nearly equal performance for his son… What happens to them on the road is not quite as important in this movie as what happens between them…
“This is a special movie. In making it, Eastwood was obviously moving away from his Dirty Harry image, but that's nothing new; his spectacular success in violent movies tends to distract us from his intriguing and challenging career as the director and/or star of such offbeat projects as Bronco Billy and Play Misty for Me. He seems to have a personal stake in this story, and we begin to feel it, too. Sometimes the simplest country songs are just telling the facts.”
PHOTOGRAPHY: Warner Bros.
