Dueling piano players, hit makers of the karaoke leaderboard and all-out tribute bands rarely get their proper due in the limelight. But get ready for the latter musical misfits to enjoy cinematic comeuppance. The true life story of two down-on-their-luck musicians who perform in a Neil Diamond cover band in grunge-era Milwaukee, Craig Brewer’s Song Sung Blue (B) is one of those movies they just don’t make anymore, the idealistic tale of two good but imperfect souls overcoming incredible odds to make amazing music and life together. A committed Hugh Jackman and a resplendent, melodic Kate Hudson co-star as Lightning & Thunder, two halves of a novelty act that doubles as an excuse for mutual burgeoning love interests. The film is unabashedly melodramatic and formulaic, and yet it still hits all the right notes to keep viewers deeply engaged. Hudson in particular is wonderful in her role, acting and singing her way through a crucible of challenges as a salt-of-the-earth everywoman. It’s a triumph for this popular actress. Brewer stages montages such as “Sweet Caroline” and “Holly Holy” with gregarious gusto, with several standout montages mirroring stage life and behind the scenes travails. This is an enjoyable crowd pleaser successfully turning on the heart lights of communal multiplex patrons everywhere.

You can call it playing a character “similar to himself” all you want, but George Clooney isn’t stretching all that much as a veteran actor regretting some of his choices in Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly (C). To flee an incident likely to get him bad press, the protagonist and his longtime manager (Adam Sandler) step away to Europe, where there’s reflection on his legacy, a look back at his cinematic canon and a flurry of memories about choices he made related to his daughters (Riley Keough and Grace Edwards). Baumbach fills the film with insider elements about the movie business but fails to paint an intriguing central character. With not much interesting to see related to the titular character and the sidelining of an inciting incident, Sandler gets a few moments to shine as he laments whether he’s a friend or a cost center in a few sequences opposite Laura Dern as a similarly underappreciated publicist.  This meta narrative treads very little new themes and isn’t particularly insightful or funny.  There’s a moment during a film retrospective that was kind of embarrassing in its awards season thirst. This year alone, the film Sentimental Value is a far richer film on the gulf and intersections between art and humanity.

Take one iambic pentameter for your sadness, and call me in the morning. Set in the Elizabethan era, Chloe Zhao’s Hamnet (C) depicts two parents grieving the loss of a child in very different ways. Jessie Buckley offers a raw and harrowing reaction; and Paul Mescal, who plays William Shakespeare, addresses his sadness more obliquely through the presentation of a tragic stage play far away from the domestic despair. Despite Zhao’s penchant for painterly and geometric imagery, there’s not a whole lot going here: sequences of courtship, pregnancy, illness, loss and reaction play out in slow dollops. It’s a far better showcase for Buckley, doing very fine work here, than Mescal, who just doesn’t seem as ensconced in the devastation. The strained chemistry between the central pair doesn’t help; thus the final act, moving for many, rang like artificial Oscar bait. It’s a bitter quill with few breakaways or takeaways.

Rose Byrne plays a beleaguered mom in Mary Bronstein’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (C-), but its protracted, insistent vibe of showing the horrors of motherhood will likely prove an endurance test for audiences in the process. Bronstein makes some big swings such as never actually showing the main character’s daughter, instead representing her as a shrieking off-screen nuisance. Then there are the all-too-obvious allegories like a gaping hole in the ceiling of their residence, where endless water flows forth. Byrne is committed to her role and acting her heart out of all the maternal madness in the threadbare plot. It’s a lot of heavy acting and heavy-handedness adding up to not much. The film erodes its own summons to empathy with each passing frame, and even Conan O’Brien playing a counselor can’t cushion the film’s blunt force. In some ways it’s the Reefer Madness of movies about deciding to have a kid, and yet it’s unclear if that’s even the point it’s trying to make.