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Misty Jones keeps her Grammy in the fridge, alongside a near-empty Tupperware of chicken broth and, well, not a whole lot else: A former country superstar turned burnt-out rural hermit, she more or less lives off what
once was, but her memories don’t exactly nourish her. Peculiar details like these enliven “Heartland,” a missing-person mystery that returns writer-director Shana Feste to the Nashville milieu of her 2010 sophomore feature “Country Strong.” So does Jessica Chastain’s surprisingly brash, beery performance as Misty, whose no-bullshit demeanor serves her well when she must turn amateur detective, investigating the disappearance of a relative who happens to be a rising country star herself.
Fusing Southern-fried noir atmospherics with the sequinned kitsch of a Music City backstage melodrama, “Heartland” often hits the same undemanding guilty-pleasure groove as “Country Strong” — or indeed the six-season run of TV’s “Nashville” in the 2010s. What it isn’t, at nearly any point, is an effective thriller. Feste’s thin screenplay is heavily reliant on Chastain’s brio to sustain a quest that only narrowly makes sense on a moment-to-moment basis, and never gathers much intrigue — since the villains are all glaringly identifiable as such from the get-go, while Misty’s rough-diamond integrity is never in doubt. The result is diverting straight-to-Netflix fare, sparkly and disposable as a rhinestone, though its star commits as though it were something more.
“There’s no such thing as good girls,” says Misty early on in proceedings. It’s not entirely true — the character hides a kind, true heart beneath a gruffly embittered exterior — but it’s a solid pointer for Chastain, always at her most interesting when playing characters who are either morally off-base (“Dreams,” “A Most Violent Year”) or at least a little prickly and defensive. And she comes out, quite literally, all guns blazing: In the film’s opening minutes, she feuds with a neighbor on the remote Georgia pecan farm where she’s settled, eventually taking a shotgun to the woman’s windows. It’s our first taste of the hot temper that cost her a mainstream music career years ago — they called her “the cunt of country,” she says with some relish — though she rarely wields it against someone who doesn’t deserve it.
It’s that hard-headed quality that her brother Donny (Paul Sparks) calls upon when he comes to her for help. His 20-something daughter Charlie (singer Carter Faith, in her film debut), herself a buzzy new talent on the Nashville country scene, has recently gone missing, and he suspects shady showbiz machinations at play — something Misty knows plenty about, even if she left that world behind long ago. And so she turns gumshoe, with an oversize felt Stetson instead of a fedora, and a lineup of men to question that range from Charlie’s too-slick-by-half manager Roy (Garrett Hedlund) to an obsessed incel stalker.
There are other, hidden reasons for Misty to take on a job that isn’t really in her skill set, though they’re not quite satisfyingly addressed, as Feste’s script toggles awkwardly between the procedural and the personal. Certain key relationships — notably that between Misty and Donny, brittle with shared secrets — are fleshed out in single scenes, never to be readdressed; elsewhere, the film dawdles on less pivotal connections, though there’s a lovely, wily supporting performance from Sugarland frontwoman Jennifer Nettles as a past friend-turned-rival, culminating in an onstage duet between her and Chastain that’s the highlight of the film’s original and on-the-money country song score. Where characters are sketchily drawn, casting is often more considered: Stalwarts like Hedlund, John Hawkes and Norbert Leo Butz all bring flickers of intelligence and eccentricity to fleeting or one-dimensional roles.
Still, this is Chastain’s show, and she’s clearly enjoying it, often daring to play things quite broad and blustery, which rather suits the occasional tackiness of the material; at other points, she convincingly locates a quiet seam of deep-set pain in the protagonist, a casualty of an industry that, it is suggested here, often takes young female talent for a ride. Misty seems vaguely inspired by the enduring mystique of Bobbie Gentry, the prodigious Nashville singer-songwriter who, after a few years at the top, retired from music and checked out of the public eye entirely. Yet the film’s somewhat half-baked mystery tends to distract us from more dramatically probing questions about Misty herself, a curious character in search of a more curious character study.
