Critical response
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 77% of 208 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 6.7/10. The website's consensus reads: "Bringing a sweet amount of dignity to the art of imitation, Song Sung Blue mostly avoids becoming a mere cover of the documentary on which it's based thanks to Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson's heartfelt performances." Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 61 out of 100, based on 46 critics, indicating "generally favorable" reviews. Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "A" on an A+ to F scale.
Amy Nicholson of the Los Angeles Times wrote: "You won't see a movie with better music and worse dialogue this holiday season than the bizarrely charming Song Sung Blue, a biopic about a husband-and-wife Neil Diamond cover band who were a fleeting sensation in 1990s Milwaukee." Caroline Siede of The A.V. Club wrote: "Based on the 2008 documentary by Greg Kohs, Sung Song Blue could have turned Mike and Claire into Christopher Guestian figures of comedy. Instead, it finds dignity within the bedazzled costumes, makeshift wind machines, and Thai restaurant performances that aid their increasingly popular novelty act."
Brian Truitt of USA Today wrote: "Can a major Hollywood star have another breakthrough role later in life? Because that's what it feels like watching Kate Hudson as a talented Midwestern pop-rock singer in Song Sung Blue. Ann Hornaday and Michael O'Sullivan of The Washington Post wrote: "You'd be forgiven for thinking Song Sung Blue is a Neil Diamond biopic. Hollywood can't seem to stop trying to immortalize famous performers by churning out heavy-handed reenactments of their inspiring life stories. What's another, really?"
Laura Venning of Empire wrote: "If you've found most recent music biopics to be snoozefests severely lacking in good old-fashioned melodrama, we bring good news. That is, unless you're allergic to sequins, luxuriant wigs and the musical stylings of Neil Diamond." Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian wrote: "Here is a startlingly strange, undeniably entertaining true-life story from the heartland of American showbusiness; a lovable crowdpleaser whose feelgood flavour won't prepare you for the way the plot repeatedly and savagely twists like an unsafe fairground ride."
Owen Gleiberman of Variety wrote: "'Song Sung Blue' is certainly a movie for the bom bom bom crowd. Mostly, though, it's for the Neil Diamond fans who will listen to Mike and Claire, in their solo show at the Ritz Theater in Milwaukee, in a state of slow-burn bliss. When Mike starts to sing the Arabic chant of Soolaimon, Diamond's single from 1970, it sounds eerie and mysterious, but when the groove kicks in it's so ecstatic you want to revel in its majesty, the same way Mike does: as a Diamond shining through the darkness." David Rooney of The Hollywood Reporter wrote "
I'll confess I was an easy mark for this movie. A key childhood memory is sitting on my aunt's living room floor — she was groovy enough to have a "feature wall" of contrast wallpaper — playing the Hot August Night double album from start to finish while everyone else was outside digesting barbecue."
Jeannette Catsoulis of The New York Times wrote: "You are bound to be won over by "Song Sung Blue", a small-scaled, bighearted tale of a real-life Milwaukee duo who absorbed the hardest of life's knocks and refused to stay down." Kyle Smith of The Wall Street Journal wrote: "Song Sung Blue won me over early on, when a bar fight breaks out over the remark shouted by a leather-clad biker dude: “Neil Diamond sucks.” Fighting words, bordering on heresy."
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