"Sweet Dreams" (1985)

"Sweet Dreams" is the very Hollywoodsy biography of country music legend Patsy Cline, a rowdy good-time gal who managed to lead a turbulent life while rising to stardom via such hits as "Crazy," "She's Got You" and "Walking After Midnight."

Jessica Lange plays Cline and gives her friskiest, most intriguing performance to date. She's matched by Ed Harris as Cline's second husband Charlie Dick, whose love for his spouse could not always override the call of the bar. There's a volatile chemistry between the actors, whether they're flirting (which they do a lot of) or feuding (which they do a lot more of).

But Lange and Harris have to fight against a choppy screenplay that zooms through the last seven years of Cline's brief career, giving us only fleeting glimpses of her domestic troubles -- when she sang about cheating men and honky tonk nights, she knew what she was speaking of -- and her bumpy road to the top of the charts.

In "Coal Miner's Daughter," Beverly D'Angelo played Cline and sang with her own voice; Lange is dubbed with Cline's original vocal tracks and lip-synchs convincingly. To some viewers this may seem like an actress taking the easy way out. Perhaps so, but it also enables those of us who aren't students of country music to hear that magnificent alto in all its glory.

There's an uncomfortably high gloss to almost everything in the movie, from the Army barracks to the lowdown bars where Cline got her start to the lower-middle-class home of Cline's mom (the superb Ann Wedgewood), and that hardly helps to lend credibility to a story that frequently seems to wobble on the edge of fiction. "Sweet Dreams" ultimately short-changes its colorful subject, although not for lack of trying on the part of Lange, Harris and Wedgewood.