Song Sung Blue, out Dec. 25, stars Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson as a husband-and-wife duo who perform in a Neil Diamond tribute band.

The characters are inspired by Mike and Claire Sardina, a real life couple that performed covers of Diamond classics in Wisconsin under their act "Lightning and Thunder.” Directed by Craig Brewer, the movie dramatizes how the couple fell in love, became a hit in the Milwaukee area, survived a life-altering accident, and made a comeback.

The film draws from Greg Kohs’ documentary about the musicians, also called Song Sung Blue, in reference to a hit song by Diamond, which Brewer discovered at the Indie Memphis film festival in Tennessee. Kohs, a co-writer on the 2025 Song Sung Blue, had given the Sardinas cameras to record candid moments for the documentary, and some of those moments became scenes in Brewer’s film.

Mike Sardina passed away in 2006. Claire, who inspired Kate Hudson’s character, spoke over Zoom about the movie’s portrayal of the highs and lows in her career.

The making of Lightning and Thunder

Mike and Claire separately performed covers of pop classics in the Milwaukee area, and one day Claire got a call from Mike, who addressed himself as “Lightning” and asking if she’d like to be his “Thunder.” 

It took a while to build a following. It’s true, as the movie shows, that the pair was booed out of a biker bar in Chicago. But after performing at the giant music festival Summerfest and the Wisconsin State Fair, their fan base grew. Singing “Forever in Blue Jeans” with Eddie Vedder in 1995 as the opening act for a Pearl Jam concert put them on the map.

The more time they spent on stage together, the more they fell in love. They married at the Wisconsin state fair, with Claire sporting a white cowboy hat. As a single parent on welfare taking care of a son (Hudson Hensley in the film) and a daughter (Ella Anderson), Claire has always described their love story as a fairytale. 

Sardina says her favorite memory of performing with Mike was singing “Girl, You’ll Be a Woman Soon” because “he would take my hand, and we would dance together on stage as he was singing the song and sing it directly to me. So when he did that, it was almost as though no one else was around, and we were dancing together.”

(L to R) Hugh Jackman as Mike Sardina and Kate Hudson as Claire Stengl in the movie Song Sung Blue. Courtesy of Focus Features

Thunder is struck

On May 10, 1999, Claire was in their front yard gardening when a car swerved out of control and hit her. Part of her left leg was amputated.

Mike vowed to stand by Claire through thick and thin. As he says in a news interview excerpted in the documentary Song Sung Blue, “I love this woman with all my heart and soul. I’ll stand by her. I’ll be her arms, legs, ears, nose, mouth. I’ll do everything for her.” 

Moviegoers will watch a painful sequence as Kate Hudson's character falls into a deep depression. She can't perform and she can’t get out of bed, and she even forgets to feed her children at one point. Between taking multiple medications and struggling with depression, Claire begins to suffer from paranoia, hallucinations and delusions. Her family decides to check her into a psychiatric ward after they find her singing in the front yard one night.

The scene is made up, and yet, it’s Claire’s favorite moment in the movie because it perfectly captures her state of mind back then. “I went back in time, and I relived it,” she says. “She was just stunningly wonderful in emulating what I was going through.”

When Claire finally felt well enough to start performing, she sat in a wheelchair on stage or behind a keyboard, even though she didn’t play the keyboard: “I would sit there and go, plunk, plunk, plunk, and fake it basically.”

Once she got a prosthetic leg, she started moving around the stage more during performances. They went back to Summerfest and the Wisconsin state fair, and as the movie shows, she performed with Mike, who had a gig as karaoke host at an Asian restaurant. Hudson channels Claire perfectly in the movie when she says, “The accident took my leg, but I shouldn’t have let it take my singing away.”

The story of overcoming this adversity is why Brewer named his 2025 film Song Sung Blue: “This is not a sad song—in a way, it's a glad song. You're dealing with a sad time in your life, but it's giving you this assurance that you can get through it...I feel that ‘Song Sung Blue’ is really what the movie is about.”

Where is Claire Sardina today?

She lives part of the year in a trailer in Wisconsin near her daughter and the rest of the time in Apache Junction near her son, who lives in Phoenix.

At 64, she is still performing—in fact, she bursts into The Beatles’ classic “When I’m Sixty-Four” over Zoom. She’s in another duo called Thunder After Lightning with Toney Luciano, who she calls her “Claire-giver” because he also takes care of her. She performs disco songs and covers of Abba, Blondie, and Patsy Cline hits, regularly taking karaoke and guest spots with live bands.

And yes, she still listens to Neil Diamond: “When I am in a down mode or a little tense, I will turn on the Neil Diamond music. I sing ‘Sweet Caroline’ myself.” She met the star in 2008, two years after Mike passed away, and he vowed to look her up whenever he’s in Milwaukee.

Twenty-six years after the accident and hitting rock bottom, she says, “I don't feel that way today.” When asked how her injury affects her nowadays, she simply says, “It's a way of life. Like anybody that has to deal with diabetes and insulin, I deal with taking my leg off at night.” 

She hopes that moviegoers who have experienced struggles—both physically and mentally—will leave the theater thinking, “‘Hey, we've experienced this, and we can come back,’ or ‘we can learn from this experience as far as how to handle adversity in life.’”