The best movie about music ever made, according to Jesse Plemons: “In my opinion”
Jesse Plemons is now one of those few actors where seeing his name attached to a film means you can almost guarantee it’s going to be good, which is a rare thing, honestly. It’s down to his ability to pick and choose the very best projects going because he is seen as a true talent in Hollywood, a modern-day equivalent to a Gene Hackman or Al Pacino of the 1970s.
His ascent has been pretty rapid over the last 15 years or so since he graduated from doing network TV in the US, but once major movie casting directors got a sniff of his ability, he almost immediately started working with some of the finest in the business: Paul Thomas Anderson, Martin Scorsese, and Steven Spielberg.
It isn’t just acting that Plemons has a penchant for, though; he is also a keen musician and had an Austin, Texas-based band for a while called Cowboy and Indian, for which he sang and played guitar. It appears that since he joined the ranks of the A-listers, he has put music on the back burner, with little activity on that front, but he does talk about a movie from 2014, which involved plenty of guitar.
He told Backstage, “I did an independent film called Flutter, where I played a musician. It was a little part, but we used a couple of my songs in that. That was a while ago. I’m a little apprehensive to go there because it’s really tricky. The songs have to be really good if they’re supposed to be good, you know?”
Plemons has a definite taste for country music, and that’s reflected in his choice of a film from the past that combines the two mediums. He added, “There are only a few music movies that I really love. I like Coal Miner’s Daughter. I think it’s maybe the best, at least in my opinion, of those types of movies. There are many others that are great, but I don’t know, it has to be really spot on, because I’m such a fan.”
Coal Miner’s Daughter is a biographical movie tracking the life of country legend Loretta Lynn, with Sissy Spacek playing the lead role and support from Tommy Lee Jones. Lynn was the girl from Kentucky who was married at 15 and went from performing in clubs in the ‘60s to having ten number one albums and 16 number one singles, receiving a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2010.
In a similar vein to Jeremy Allen White on the recent Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, Spacek performed all the songs on the movie’s soundtrack, and the film was a huge hit commercially and with critics, earning seven Oscar nominations and winning ‘Best Actress’ for Spacek.
Plemons may well have his own Oscar success if rumours about his possible nomination for this year’s Yorgos Lanthimos movie Bugonia come to pass, and we’ll be seeing plenty more of him over the next year or so, thanks to a new Hunger Games movie, Sunrise on the Reaping, plus a movie called Judy from Birdman director Alejandro G Iñárritu.
The black comedy features a jaw-dropping cast including Tom Cruise, Riz Ahmed and John Goodman and will be Inarritu’s first English-language film since 2015’s The Revenant with Leonardo DiCaprio.
