No movie that opens with the line "Time was never a friend to Bobby Long" could possibly be any good, and sure enough, A Love Song For Bobby Long lives down to its squibbed kickoff. A hammy John Travolta—is there any other kind lately?—plays a dandyish New Orleans drunkard intellectual living with his protégé Gabriel Macht in the house of their late junkie lounge singer friend. When the singer dies, her daughter Scarlett Johansson returns home to claim her property and isn't too pleased to find that her mother agreed to let two boozehounds crash indefinitely. As for Travolta and Macht, they're appalled that Johansson's a high school dropout who comes to them straight from a trailer park in Panama City, Florida, a.k.a. the "Redneck Riviera." The men conspire to get Johansson an education, while she pushes them to stop wasting days down at their favorite hangout, The Rock Bottom.
The name of the bar should be a clue to the on-the-nose nature of A Love Song For Bobby Long. First-time writer-director Shainee Gabel adapts Ronald Everett Capps' novel Off Magazine Street, and sets it in a world divided between romantic Big Easy decay (all cemeteries and crumbling gothic houses) and laughable white trash impulsiveness (all bad wigs and couch-surfers eating peanut butter off a spoon). The story circles the tragic piece of Travolta's history that drove him out of a respectable career as a college professor—"a damn good one" according to Macht—but there's nothing subtle about the way the actor carries his character's ghosts around, and nothing especially urgent about his fumbling for redemption. The movie lopes along with a lot of exaggerated drawling and shouting, before settling into a series of climactic explanations.
A Love Song For Bobby Long features a decent soundtrack, mixing Bayou-flavored R&B with a little indie-rock, and buried between the overheated melodrama and strained lead performances, Deborah Kara Unger does some memorably nuanced work as a Rock Bottom bartender who thinks she's in a relationship with Macht. But the movie trots out too much phony local color, and Gabel uses literary references as a stand-in for real character-building. Travolta and Macht swap quotes as a kind of game, and in A Love Song For Bobby Long's biggest howler, Travolta appears to be harassing Macht, until the young man breaks down crying, at which point Travolta croaks, "But … it's Dylan Thomas. That's an easy one."