Movie · 1975 · Drama, Comedy, Music · 2h 40m · R · English
Curator score: 9.3/10 (104K ratings)
The damndest thing you ever saw.
Overview
The intersecting stories of twenty-four characters—from country star to wannabe to reporter to waitress—connect to the music business in Nashville, Tennessee.
Ratings
Curator score: 9.3/10
IMDb: 7.6/10
Letterboxd: 4.17/5
Rotten Tomatoes: 89%
Metacritic: 96
TMDB: 7.2/10
Director
Robert Altman
Production
Paramount Pictures, ABC Entertainment, Jerry Weintraub Productions
Cast
David Arkin, Barbara Baxley, Ned Beatty, Karen Black, Ronee Blakley, Timothy Brown, Keith Carradine, Geraldine Chaplin, Robert DoQui, Shelley Duvall, Allen Garfield, Henry Gibson, Scott Glenn, Jeff Goldblum, Barbara Harris, David Hayward, Michael Murphy, Allan F. Nicholls, Dave Peel, Cristina Raines
Curator Review
Verdict
A sprawling, funny, and politically charged ensemble film that uses the country-music world to map American performance, ambition, loneliness, and power. It’s demanding in length and density, but the rewards are enormous if you like movies that feel alive, messy, and observant.
Best for
fans of ensemble dramas
viewers interested in American politics and culture
people who enjoy improvisational or loose naturalistic filmmaking
music-movie fans who don’t need a conventional backstage arc
viewers who like satirical social observation
Skip if
you want a tight, plot-driven story
you dislike large casts and overlapping dialogue
you need a conventional musical with polished performances
you’re impatient with slow-burn, episodic structure
you prefer clear emotional closure
Overview
Robert Altman turns Nashville into both a place and a state of mind: a city where entertainment, politics, vanity, and loneliness all bleed into one another. The film’s enormous cast never feels like a gimmick; it’s the point. Everyone is performing, whether onstage, on the campaign trail, or in casual conversation, and Altman keeps catching people in the act of trying to matter.
Worth noting
What makes it so enduring is how funny and sad it is at the same time. The songs are catchy, sometimes deliberately plain, and they work as character studies as much as numbers. The movie keeps expanding outward until it feels less like a story than a whole social ecosystem, one that’s both specific to 1970s America and uncannily current.
Bottom line
It’s not an easy watch in the usual sense, and that’s part of its power. If you surrender to its rhythms, Nashville becomes one of cinema’s great portraits of public life: noisy, contradictory, wounded, and weirdly communal.
Top Letterboxd reviews
Karsten (5★) · 2148 likes
my pick for the first movie i’d show an alien. has everything you need to know about film, music, people, america, all of it is here. and more! so natural too, watching the commentary i’m not surprised how many happy accidents there were while filming. perfect, every second of it
Josh Lewis (5★) · 2111 likes
"All of us are equally involved with politics whether we know it or not and whether we like it or not," or "we must be doing something right to last 200 years."
Probably the quintessential film about the overwhelming forces at the intersection of American art, industry and politics, and the people who try their best to live inside them.
davidehrlich (5★) · 1667 likes
NASHVILLE is one of those films that, while you're watching it, seems like the only kind of movie there is or ever should be.
much more to come on this one as we near the release of the Criterion blu-ray in early december.
Karsten (5★) · 1150 likes
watched this yesterday and put off logging it because i haven’t been able to come up with a single thing to say. not in a bad way, oooobviously, but because there’s arguably too much to say. i knew it was a big movie and i knew there were a lot of characters and i knew there was a lot of country and i knew it was very american and i knew it was very 70s and i knew about the… more watched this yesterday and put off logging it because i haven’t been able to come up with a single thing to say. not in a bad way, oooobviously, but because there’s arguably too much to say. i knew it was a big movie and i knew there were a lot of characters and i knew there was a lot of country and i knew it was very american and i knew it was very 70s and i knew about the… more
Will Sloan (5★) · 1150 likes
One of the best movies ever made. Among the film's many achievements, the Elliot Gould scene captures the atmosphere of "there's a celebrity in the room" better than anything else I've seen.
Haven Hamilton (Henry Gibson) is one of the best characters ever - maybe cinema's greatest embodiment of the local celebrity. He's never made it out of Nashville, so to cope, he has become a self-appointed mascot/father for the city. When he sings at the Grand Ole Opry, he's… more
1991 · Comedy, Drama, Music · 1h 58m · R · Curator 7.5/10 (82.5K ratings) · Where to watch: fuboTV, Peacock Premium, Peacock Premium Plus
A music-driven ensemble with humor and grit, focused on aspiration, identity, and group friction.
Topics
ensemble drama, satire, country music, American politics, 1970s cinema, social realism, show business, improvisational style, regional portrait, bittersweet