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Doc Jenkins (Willie Nelson) is a broke songwriter and session musician. He had a hit song but all the money goes to his unscrupulous producer who owns all the rights. He still loves his ex-wife and former music star Honey Carder (Melinda Dillon). He only has managing his old singing partner Blackie Buck (Kris Kristofferson) who introduces him to new singer Gilda (Lesley Ann Warren). Dino McLeish (Rip Torn) is her money-grubbing manager who agrees to go 50-50.

The story is a little messy and meandering. It's scruffy like Willie Nelson himself. This almost feels like an Altman film if there is a few more crowded dialogue scenes. It did get an Oscar nomination for music. It also has the undeniable easy charms of Willie Nelson. That goes a long way.

Alan Rudolph always makes interesting films and this little-seen mid-80s effort is no exception. The plot involves a singer/songwriter who discovers that the record company who initially signed him up have screwed him over with a disadvantageous ironclad contract that he is unable to break. Not one to give up though, the music legend attempts to release his own songs using a female singer as a front, but will the record company eventually catch on? While this might sound very slim as far as plot lines go, 'Songwriter' is a film more about its characters than any story, with lots of memorable dialogue as lead actor Willie Nelson interacts with various associates who band together to help him out of the jam. "Everybody has to kill their own snakes," he philosophises at one point and a poolside treatment that one such associate gets from sleeping around leads to possibly the film's most memorable scene. The film takes a while to warm up though, and catchy as Kris Kristofferson's songs for the film may well be, the song performance scenes are never as interesting as the character drama, but generally speaking, this is a worthwhile experience. There is a lot of fun to be had in Nelson using the tricks of the trade that he has acquired over the years to get back at the record company and Lesley Ann Warren's internal dilemmas resonate as the young female singer fronting for Nelson. The title for the movie is really quite astute in this regard; it could apply equally to her and Nelson as the actual and fake songwriters of the film respectively.

Willie Nelson is a songwriter in the country/western genre and a very successful one -- artistically, anyway. Most of the money is taken by the producers, including Rip Torn. Eventually Wilson gets together with his old performing partner, Kris Kristofferson, Lesley Ann Warren, and Melinda Dillon to right old wrongs and get the rights to his song back.

Most of the pleasure in this movie is, of course, in the music; Kristofferson was nominated for the Best Score Oscar. There's fun, too, in watching the suits get worked over in their never-ending greed, and the Austin location shooting is excellent.

"Songwriter" never fails to hit the spot. This may sound weird but watching this movie feels like hanging out with old friends. There's a lot of great dialogue and a lot of laughs. There's a lot of good music, too. "Songwriter" is filled with great characters and has a terrific villain. Everybody in the cast delivers a solid performance. "Honeysuckle Rose" may be a better movie but "Songwriter" is more fun to watch. Honorable mention: Rip Torn.

In Hollywood vernacular this would be the quintessential sleeper: a small gem straight out of left field forced to look after itself in a market geared more toward largely impersonal blockbusters. It isn't necessary to be a fan of country-western music to enjoy the film: a disarming comic fable about one man's clever attempt to buck the system, represented here by the music industry. The movie works (in part) because of its oblique, slightly skewed narrative style, courtesy of Bud Shrake's elliptical screenplay and director Alan Rudolph's eye for offhand detail. Some of the Southern accents are thick enough to almost require subtitles, but the film is a true original, with a photogenic performance by Willie Nelson as the roguish title character.