Jessica Chastain Goes Country Noir in Netflix's 'Heartland': Review

Jessica Chastain keeps a Grammy in the fridge in "Heartland" — next to a near-empty Tupperware of chicken broth — and that image tells you most of what writer-director Shana Feste's new film gets right. The Netflix missing-person mystery reunites Feste with the Nashville milieu of her 2010 feature "Country Strong," and it hands Chastain one of her brasher, beeries roles: Misty Jones, a former country superstar turned burnt-out rural hermit who turns amateur detective when a young relative disappears.

The missing woman is Charlie (singer Carter Faith, in her film debut), the 20-something daughter of Misty's brother Donny (Paul Sparks) and a buzzy new talent on the Nashville scene herself. Donny suspects shady showbiz machinations. Misty knows that world, even if she abandoned it decades ago.

What does the film actually deliver?

Diversion, mostly. Feste fuses Southern-fried noir atmospherics with the sequinned kitsch of a Music City backstage melodrama, and "Heartland" often lands in the same undemanding guilty-pleasure groove as "Country Strong" — or the six-season run of TV's "Nashville" in the 2010s. What it is not, at nearly any point, is an effective thriller. The villains are glaringly identifiable from the outset, Misty's rough-diamond integrity is never in doubt, and Feste's thin screenplay leans heavily on Chastain's brio to sustain a quest that only narrowly makes sense moment to moment. The result is straight-to-Netflix fare, sparkly and disposable as a rhinestone.

Chastain commits regardless. "There's no such thing as good girls," Misty says early on — a line that suits an actress always at her most interesting when playing characters who are morally off-base ("Dreams," "A Most Violent Year") or at least prickly and defensive. In the opening minutes, Misty feuds with a neighbor on the remote Georgia pecan farm where she has settled, eventually taking a shotgun to the woman's windows. It is the first taste of the hot temper that cost her a mainstream career years ago.

Who fills out the supporting cast?

• Garrett Hedlund as Roy, Charlie's too-slick-by-half manager
• Paul Sparks as Donny, Misty's brother, brittle with shared secrets
• Carter Faith as Charlie, in her screen debut
• Jennifer Nettles, Sugarland's frontwoman, as a past friend-turned-rival
• John Hawkes and Norbert Leo Butz in fleeting, one-dimensional roles

Nettles gives a lovely, wily supporting performance that culminates in an onstage duet with Chastain — the highlight of the film's original country song score. Where characters are sketchily drawn, the casting is more considered: Hedlund, Hawkes and Butz all bring flickers of intelligence to underwritten parts.

The script toggles awkwardly between the procedural and the personal. Key relationships, notably between Misty and Donny, are fleshed out in single scenes and never readdressed, while the film dawdles on less pivotal connections. There are hidden reasons for Misty to take on a job outside her skill set, though the film never satisfyingly addresses them.

Chastain also locates a quiet seam of deep-set pain in the protagonist — a casualty of an industry that, the film suggests, often takes young female talent for a ride. Misty seems vaguely modeled on Bobbie Gentry, the Nashville singer-songwriter who retired from music and left public life entirely after a few years at the top. Yet the half-baked mystery keeps distracting from the more dramatically probing questions about Misty herself: a curious character still in search of a more curious character study.