Honeysuckle Rose (film)

Buck Bonham is a country singer with a good family, struggling to find national fame. He juggles his music career with his responsibilities to his wife Viv and son Jamie. He has everything going his way until Lily Ramsey, the daughter of his former guitarist Garland joins his tour. The road leads to temptation, which leads to his downfall.

The film was screened out of competition at the 1981 Cannes Film Festival.^[4] Honeysuckle Rose holds a 60% rating on Rotten Tomatoes based on six reviews.^[5] Wide Open Country music magazine ranked it the second best Willie Nelson film, behind Red Headed Stranger.^[6]

Film critic Roger Ebert called the film "sly and entertaining"^[7] yet ultimately predictable and disappointing:

The movie remains resolutely at the level of superficial cliché, resisting any temptation to make a serious statement about the character's hard-drinking, self-destructive lifestyle...Honeysuckle Rose has the kind of problems that can be resolved with an onstage reconciliation in the last scene: Willie and Dyan singing a duet together and everybody knowing things will turn out all right.^[7]

Regarding Willie Nelson's performance, Janet Maslin wrote in the New York Times:

Mr. Nelson doesn't entirely fit his role, any more than the other actors fit theirs. He seems too odd, too solitary, for all the intimacy forced upon him by the story line. But he brings tremendous authority to every gesture, and his character is the only thing in the movie about which the audience is bound to want to know more. Mr. Nelson accomplishes all this in a role with very little dialogue, which makes his sheer force of personality seem all the more impressive.^[8]

Honeysuckle Rose opened theatrically in 826 venues on July 18, 1980, and earned $2,189,966 in its first weekend, ranking third in the domestic box office. Ultimately, the film grossed $17,815,212.^[3] Variety put its domestic rentals at $9 million. The film made a substantial amount of its total revenue from a presale of television rights to NBC for just under $5 million, which made it profitable.^[9]

The film is recognized by American Film Institute in these lists:

• 2004: AFI's 100 Years...100 Songs:
  • "On the Road Again" – Nominated^[11]