Portland, United States - In Crazy Heart,  Bridges plays an alcoholic, many-times-married guy, old enough to have a grown son and a lifetime of memories made both good and bad. His life is country music, as writer, singer, promoter and man on the move, in a story that shows the burnt out, backside ways of a guy looking for a way out or a way up while his time is running out.

 In the story Bridges character, Blake, meets a young female journalist in a small town. She is captivated by an adventure that focuses on furtive and furious sex, with a guy with a past. Sex is full of spontaneity and wildness and far removed from the ordinary life of small-town folks, especially one for a single woman with a child to support. The film is raw, slow-paced with a beauty that comes from performances that reflect a way of life experienced by country musicians whose music often reinforces the image of a rough life of women and booze and song. It's a story of love and redemption that uncovers layers of human behavior in lives that seem real and full-blooded, reminiscent of stories from the lives of performers like Waylon Jennings, Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson and George Jones. These are the tough guys with hearts of gold, booze and women distilled together to form the drug that keeps men on the road going on. Criticss declare Bridges' performance of the lifestyle may earn him an Academy Award. He has already son a Golden Globe for lead actor this year for his work in Crazy Heart.

 Like other countries, music plays a part in the culture. For many people in the United States country music is part of that culture, defining how people live and respond to one another. How real is the life as it looks in a bar in a western town, where country music has ruled in the back roads and bars for many years? Digital Journal found it on a strip in Portland, Oregon where country music played at its best, the old routines, in an atmosphere of what makes country real for ordinary folk in ordinary towns on the weekends across America.

■ Carol Forsloff The scene here at a bar in Gresham, Oregon is not unlike the scenes in the movie Crazy Heart starring Jeff Bridges.

With a small dance floor in the front, a group of musicians played in the reflection of Bud lights and neon signs around the perimeter of the room, lights that danced off tables along the bar, and filtered over pool tables where Levi-clad men and women brought country to life in the fashion shown by the film. The reflections reveal how crazy hearts meld in the shades of a saloon on a Saturday night as raw and as real as a film that just might win an Oscar for Jeff Bridges who is said to have captured country's real soul.