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Acting Up: Beau Bridges Puts on a Captivating Performance as Over-the-Hill Country Singer Claude Allen in ‘The Neon Highway’


July 31, 2024

The Snapshot

In The Neon Highway, Beau Bridges plays over-the-hill country singer Claude Allen, a man living in obscurity until a young country singer finds him and gives him the chance to reclaim some glory. 

(The Neon Highway is currently available to stream on Netflix.)

The Performance:

For a lot of older male actors, there comes a time when they enter the “old coot” phase of their career. Paul Newman hit it before he died, Bruce Dean is firmly in the middle of it and Clint Eastwood has been there for years. Usually, it looks like the actor entered the phase kicking and screaming, but now and again, you find one who fully embraces it.

That’s Beau Bridges, and it’s never been clearer than in his newest film, the country music drama The Neon Highway.

In The Neon Highway, Bridges’s Claude Allen is living in a beat-up old house in rural Tennessee when an installer from the phone and cable company comes to get him hooked up. That installer, a former country singer named Wayne Collins (Rob Mayes) who once came close to being a star but blew it, recognizes him and plays Claude a song he wrote. Claude recognizes the song for the sure hit that it is, and decides to team up with Wayne to get it into the right hands.

The thing is, Claude has been out of the game for many years and the people he used to know aren’t around anymore. On top of that, things work a lot differently than they used to, and his particular way of behaving and talking to people doesn’t fly. 

It would be easy to make this character unlikable. On the page, he probably was. When you give a role like that to a guy who’s been acting his whole life, who has won multiple Emmys for that work and been nominated for plenty more than that, such a character can come alive and become someone you start to root for almost despite yourself. A great actor can add gravitas and empathy to that kind of role, and make him eminently watchable.

That’s what Beau Bridges does in The Neon Highway. Claude Allen is, let’s be honest, a bit of a jerk, who resents the fact that his career seems to be over. The way Claude comes alive when he hears Wayne’s song, air entering his body and inflating him to action, it’s a magical moment in a movie that, frankly, could use more of them.

Even though Mayes’ Wayne has more screen time, this is Claude Allen’s movie, and Bridges takes full advantage of that, making himself the center of every scene he’s in. From that first appearance in which he’s disheveled and broken, to the moment he hears that song, to when he and Wayne decide to head to Nashville in an attempt to sell it, and Claude is suddenly clean-shaven and dressed for action, there’s a real transformation that is all physical. His body language changes. He stands straighter. His chin is out. He’s found the part of himself that he lost years ago.

That’s both good and bad, especially for poor Wayne, who finds himself steamrolled by the newly reborn Claude. One particularly unpleasant recording session is hard to watch, primarily because the viewer can see Claude going off the rails, and like Wayne, is powerless to stop it. After that, Claude keeps getting kicked in the proverbial teeth but continues to believe in himself in a way that he hasn’t in a long, long time.

The pride is back, and Bridges hammers us with it, for better or worse. He is pretty clearly okay with the audience not liking Claude, which performs that much more power. 

In the end, Claude has won our respect and affection, even if we still wonder how much we like him. That’s all Bridges, and it’s great fun to see a professional lay down a performance like he does here.

The Career:

There is something comforting about an older actor showing what he can do. Not just someone who happens to be old, mind you, but someone who’s been doing it their whole life, and indeed grew up on screen. It’s not a long list of people who were child actors and, decades later, are still at it, but two of them have the last name Bridges. One of them, of course, is the Dude himself, Oscar-winning Jeff Bridges. The other is his big brother Beau.

Beau Bridges has been doing the professional acting thing for three-quarters of a century. Yes, really. His first credited film role was in the 1949 adaptation of John Steinbeck’s The Red Pony when Beau was seven years old. Now 82, he has over 220 acting credits in film and TV which, if it’s not the highest number of any living actor, it’s pretty far up the list.

The son of movie star Lloyd Bridges, both Bridges boys have been acting all their lives. They have had very different careers — Jeff has always been more of a leading man than Beau, who is something of a consummate character actor — and have appeared on screen more than once, most notably in the 1989 drama The Fabulous Baker Boys, but they’re no nepo babies. The fact that Beau is still going strong as an octogenarian tells you all you need to know about how well he has honed his craft.

It’s fun to see something like that, an older man who is so in command of his skills that he makes a difficult role look effortless. It’s not the kind of thing you just do automatically. You have to grow into it, and after spending almost his entire life on screens both big and small, it’s fairly evident that Beau Bridges has, and he’s not anywhere close to losing it. 

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