Silly me. I go to see a film about a country musician, and am then disappointed when the story is formulaic, built on an overfamiliar melancholy refrain. Never mind that Crazy Heart is beautifully performed by leads Jeff Bridges and Maggie Gyllenhall, it doesn’t really step outside of some very narrow confines, and as a result there’s really nothing to report other than if you like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing you’ll like.

Which is a shame. Written and directed by Scott Cooper from a novel by Thomas Cobb, Crazy Heart is a film that stands foursquare in the tradition of the music biopic, even if in this case its subject is fictional. Bridges plays Bad Blake, a grizzled country singer with a drink problem and a troubled past. If it pains me to write those words, it pained me even more to watch the highly expensive resources devoted to this stereotypical story do nothing other than exactly what you’d expect them to.

So, Bad Blake starts off playing at a fleapit venue, and uses his reputation to secure free booze, and sleeps with a woman who associates Bad with her own heyday way back when. Then he does the same again. You could rinse and repeat indefinitely, but of course we’re in need of an Inciting Incident, which comes in the form of a journalist half his age: Ms Gyllenhall. In my eyes, her performance is stronger than that of Jeff’s, which is to say she gleans more interesting results from unpromising source material. She’s a single mum, a bit in awe of Bad’s wayward talent (that he wastes), while she has no pride in her own writing.

Anyway, after he crashes his stock car she comes to visit him in hospital, and…

Hang on, the stock car business didn’t happen. It was one of the scenes I made up to invigorate what was happening on screen: something that could have happened and would have been more adventurous than what does unfold. Did I mention Jeff and Maggie get it together? That she’s won over by his old school charm despite knowing he’s been married four times and has a first name that’s a bit of a signifier? What about her ability to melt his heart so that he’s inspired to write songs for the first time in years? And that it all goes horribly wrong in a bittersweet way, so the two bruised romantics are once again left on their own?

Well, that’s how it all hangs together. There is, naturally, a redemptive element to all this. In my fantasy version, Bridges realises his problems are down to adopting a corrosive masculine archetype, and aided by ecstasy tablets in a San Francisco leather bar, discovers an empowering new identity, and rerecords his greatest hits with a new manlove angle. But no, instead he goes to Alcoholics Anonymous, where I have a horrible idea this project was conceived in the first place.

Listen: there is nothing wrong with Crazy Heart. It’s beautifully acted, and tugs at the heartstrings just so from time to time. But it’s utterly predictable, doing nothing new or interesting with the raw ingredients it’s constructed from. Which may explain why it was so heavily tipped for Oscar glory, but does nothing for me as a viewer or a writer. I’m not looking for novelty at every turn, and the pursuit of it can be tiresome in the extreme — but Crazy Heart is so safe that it misses the chance to do something special, something that might just be beautiful.

A couple of paragraphs back I toyed with the idea of a gay element to the film, and it’s interesting that three of the most remarkable films of recent years — Far From Heaven, Brokeback Mountain and Milk — have effectively been quality mainstream movies with a gay angle. Now, maybe that in turn is old hat — and I look forward to the day when gay relationships are depicted on a regular basis by actors happy to take such roles — but surely there has to be some new angle to a story about a broken down country singer who has problems with drink and women. Please?