Heartland Has Jessica Chastain Vibrating With Rage and Nowhere Much to Go

Netflix's Nashville noir has the right star, the right setting, and a script that keeps steering toward the generic exit. Country atmosphere can't save a plot that telegraphs its own twist.

Heartland opens with what feels like a checklist of on-screen female mess: the lonely tear, the bar pickup, the beer bottle on the nightstand, the joint in the bathroom. Shana Feste, who made Country Strong in 2010, is working familiar ground — the washed-up female star as damaged crusader. The difference this time is Jessica Chastain, who plays Misty Jones as though every nerve is exposed, vibrating with what the film keeps calling apostate vengeance. She carries more than the script deserves. The setup is functional noir: Misty's niece Charlie Heart, a rising Nashville ingenue (played by country singer Carter Faith), goes missing, leaving behind a trail of red herrings that the film catalogs with the dutiful efficiency of a CBS pilot. There's the smug blonde ex-boyfriend Jace (Ross Lynch), the vacillating manager Roy Combs (Garrett Hedlund), the book of old record contracts. The suspects are assembled, the clues distributed. What's missing is any real sense that the mystery matters beyond its function as a vehicle for Misty to storm back into Nashville. Feste's script has a sharp eye for the genuine contradictions of country music — the rural mythology sustaining suburban money, the Madonna-badass squeeze on its female stars, the place's perpetual identity crisis — but mostly leaves these on the table. Heartland gestures at the southern gothic atmosphere of Sharp Objects without the patience to build real dread, and gestures at the antiheroine complexity of prestige drama without the runtime or the structural confidence to earn it. At just under two hours, it moves at what the review fairly calls a dirt-road rough clip, which is both its mercy and its problem: fast enough to stay watchable, too fast to develop anything. The Nashville texture is where the film earns its keep. The Bluebird Cafe appears. Live fixtures from the actual scene get screen time — Channing Wilson performing Alan Jackson's Tall, Tall Trees in a dive bar gives the film more flavor than most of its straight-to-streaming competition. The soundtrack, reverse-engineered country hits, is passably inoffensive when it isn't being aggressively corny. There's something genuinely country-esque about the space Heartland occupies between cheesy and serious — that register is native to the form — but the film never quite decides if it's leaning in or apologizing for it. The final act collapses. Jennifer Nettles of Sugarland appears with evident good will and limited material, and the resolution arrives via the kind of plot mechanics that feel designed to satisfy rather than surprise. Chastain keeps shading degrees of pain around her character's overstated gun-totin' persona even when the script won't meet her there, but the tenaciousness tips into borderline camp when surrounded by dead-serious clangers ('there's no such thing as good girls'). The film is not without its pleasures — a Grammy in an empty fridge is the kind of image that earns its bluntness — but pleasures this scattered don't add up to a hit.