Heartland review – Jessica Chastain’s Netflix country music thriller is more miss than hit

The Oscar winner plays a singer turned detective searching for her niece in an overly generic Nashville-based mystery that fails to find its footing

Given the popularity of its music and the streaming services’ interest in faith-based programming, I’m always a little surprised that there aren’t more movies and TV shows about Nashville. Well, at least the idea of Nashville, the country music mecca that is perpetually struggling to define itself within and against the country at large, a place that has always been more diverse than its reputation yet still stands for a certain image of white, Christian Americana. There are plenty of enduring contradictions to mine there – the hyper-masculine men singing with their hearts on their sleeve, the Madonna-badass complex among its relatively few female stars, the suburban money in a genre ostensibly speaking to the rural common man.

Netflix seems to be aiming for some of those complexities with Heartland, a patchy neo-noir thriller starring Jessica Chastain as a washed-up former star turned vigilante detective with an axe to grind on Music Row. Chastain’s Misty Jones is certainly a thorny Nashville archetype, a female lead we might call “unlikable” painted in the stark terms of a bad country song (said with love as someone raised on country radio). The first five minutes of the nearly two-hour feature from Shana Feste, the writer-director perhaps best known for the 2010 movie Country Strong that launched Gwyneth Paltrow’s brief singing career, churn through the greatest hits of on-screen female fuck-up: teary loneliness, near-wordless pick-up of a stranger from the bar, beer bottle on the nightstand, joint in the bathroom, haunting echoes of erstwhile better days (in this case, a Grammy in an empty fridge, which does feel inspired in its bluntness).

Foul-mouthed and irascible but bristling with hurt, liable to cry and pull a gun on you within 10 seconds, Misty, we’re told by every character that comes into contact with her – lest inattentive viewers miss the first mention – is a renegade piece of work. She’s long since self-isolated on a farm in Georgia, for reasons almost parodic in their portent vagueness, after she left Nashville abruptly 20 years ago, an era the characters speak about as if it was some bygone, rustic past and not still within the span of Taylor Swift’s career. (The Bluebird Cafe, the launchpad of Swift’s country record deal as well as many others, makes a welcome appearance, one of several Nashville institutions that lend Heartland a rare-for-Netflix sense of place.)

But for all Misty’s fiery resistance – and Chastain plays her as near vibrating with apostate vengeance – she gets sucked back into the scene when her estranged brother (Paul Sparks) seeks her help: her niece, the improbably named Charlie Heart (country singer Carter Faith), a 22-year-old Nashville ingenue in her own right, has gone missing. She’s left behind a trail of clues befitting a CBS pilot in the Sheridan-verse: a potential stalker, a book of old record contracts, a suspiciously smug ex in fellow blonde singer Jace (Ross Lynch), a mustachioed manager in Roy Combs (Garrett Hedlund) whose charisma vacillates between tender and seedy.

Though it seems to aim for the southern gothic and antiheroine chic of HBO’s Sharp Objects, Heartland, thankfully, is not an eight-part series, and proceeds at a dirt-road rough clip; I will abide Netflix’s spoiler warning, but an abrupt early turn one could see coming from a country mile unfortunately steers the film toward a more generic path. At times, Misty’s amateur detective work and forays back on to the stage – the soundtrack of country hits reverse-engineered here passably inoffensive, and at least performed in real venues – fall on the Big Green Tractor side of country music: so unabashedly corny in its pandering to “real America” that it is hard to resist. The affected accents and dead-serious clangers (“there’s no such thing as good girls,” Misty spits) can be intoxicating in their directness; scenes of sippin’ whiskey in dive bars accompanied by some of the real fixtures on the live scene (Channing Wilson singing Alan Jackson’s Tall, Tall Trees, for one) give the film a more distinct flavor than much of its straight-to-streaming brethren.

But mostly, and especially in a hackneyed final act notable only for the benevolent presence of Sugarland’s Jennifer Nettles, Heartland struggles to keep a pulse. It’s not for lack of effort; with each brimming tear, Chastain tries to shade degrees of Misty’s pain around her overstated gun-totin’ persona and histrionic plot twist. But though she fulfills the main movie star requirement of being the one to watch in every scene, her tenaciousness reads as borderline camp when surrounded by such silliness. To be fair, there’s something appealing, and country-esque, in the space between cheesy and serious. But Heartland seems more destined for background music than a hit.