This week on Just Pray On It Theatre is Unsung Hero (now streaming on Starz), a biopic of the Smallbone family that has the yarbles to make a couple of jokes about the name Smallbone. But the cleverness ends there, as this is a faith-based BOATS (Based On A True Story) movie that chronicles the riches-to-rags-to-riches hardship of Helen and David Smallbone, who packed up their six kids (and one baby still in utero) and moved from Australia to Tennessee in 1991 to pursue David’s music-biz career. The rest, as they say, is history: One of their children became Christian artist Rebecca St. James, and two formed Christian country-rock act For King and Country, and careers were made and Grammys won. My only prayer for this movie – written and directed by David Smallbone’s son and real-life For King and Country singer Joel Smallbone (with help from filmmaker Richard L. Ramsey) – addressed my desire to not have to endure multiple scenes of praying, but my prayer wasn’t answered. So I guess I have to come to the conclusion that God must be dead.
UNSUNG HERO: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: Before we get into the plot and the characters and the actors’ names in parentheses following the characters’ names and all that, let’s address the weirdness here: The real-life Joel Smallbone plays his father David Smallbone in this movie. Which means he had to wrap his head around playing a character who sleeps with a woman playing his own mother, and we know this had to happen because they have many, many children. Speaking of the kids – this therefore means Joel Smallbone had to cast a kid to play himself as a youngster, which is another layer of headf—ery. MY brain hurts just thinking about this meta-narrative, so kudos to Joel for having the psychological fortitude to do it at all, even if he doesn’t do it particularly well.
Anyway. Contemporary Christian hair-metallers Stryper (YELLOW AND BLACK ATTACK, YO!) are headlining an arena, so we know this is a pre-Nirvana era. David Smallbone (Joel Smallbone) booked the gig. He’s a successful promoter of Christian concerts. How successful? His family lives in a sprawling, palatial home that, one assumes, has a bedroom for each of his six kids, and then some. David’s wife is Helen (Daisy Betts), a stay-at-home mom who herds the brood. Their life is great and perfect and they get along marvelously with David’s parents and man, booking Stryper and Petra and whoever must be a more lucrative gig than I thought. I always assumed the sacks of dough came with booking Warrant and Ratt. I guess whether you pray to god or the devil doesn’t matter – you’ll get filthy-ass rich either way.
Until the filthy-ass richness evaporates, that is. David books Amy Grant and then the Aussie economy collapses and then Amy plays to a sparse crowd at the Sydney Opera House. Dude lost his ass, and that ass is worth a half-million. “We’ve lost everything,” David says, breaking it to Helen, and the worry creeps across her face like a shadow. He jumps on the phone and tries to drum up a tour, but his rep is tarnished and in THIS economy? is a legit beef. He dials up Eddie DeGarmo (Jonathan Jackson) of Xian rockers DeGarmo and Key, and Eddie disses him hard. That thump sound you just heard? That’s David hitting bottom. On top of that, Helen has another bun in the oven. Mixed feelings all around on that one.
But things aren’t hopeless. David lands a gig managing an artist – in Nashville. Helen gives him two years to get this endeavor off the ground. She believes in him and believes that the big guy up above is taking care of them. They hop a plane and get to America and get hassled by customs officers, but that prayer she uttered earlier saves the Smallbone clan from further trouble, of course. They get to their humble house and there’s no furniture and they sleep on the floor and Helen makes a game out of it for the kids and then David learns his management gig is as dead as a D-conned rat. They pray and go to church and pray and wash clothes in the bathtub and pray and use coupons and pray and start raking and mowing yards and cleaning houses for cash to pay the bills. One day they knock on the door of a mansion down yonder and who answers the door but that dink DeGarmo. Is this an answered prayer or amazing coincidence or an ironic miracle, or what? Sorry, I don’t possess enough True Faith to answer that one.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Back to Black, Bob Marley: One Love, Unsung Hero – the state of the music biopic is rocky in 2024.
Performance Worth Watching: Betts does pretty much all the heavy-lifting in this movie, giving a polished and naturalistic performance in a movie that really really needs it.
Memorable Dialogue: The fam is held up at customs:
Officer, looking at passports: Mr…. Smallbone?
David: If I was gonna use a fake name, it wouldn’t be that, right?
Sex and Skin: So much implied sex! Not that we see any of it.
Our Take: In case I haven’t made this clear enough, Unsung Hero features a praying scene in between just about every other scene in this movie. Also in the pursuit of clarity, the title refers to Helen, who manages her family’s hardship with great resiliency, keeping the kids upbeat and supporting a husband who bears all the weighty guilt of creating this desperate situation, and acts like a heavily bruised egotist when a wealthy couple from their church, played by Josh Lucas and Candace Cameron Bure, generously helps out (“God told us to give you our van!”). God very much is not the titular hero, because he is so very much sung in this movie, praised and thanked implicitly and explicitly in scene after scene after scene.
You know that recent trend of faith-based movies that show restraint and don’t peen-hammer us over the head with the gospel? This is not one of those movies. No, Unsung Hero is a throwback to Christian films past, the likes of which dump bulldozer-bucketsful of proselytizing messages on its built-in audience – like so much contemporary Christian music, this is not an inclusive film, and absolutely preaches to the choir – and emphasizes The Word over competent filmmaking, performances and production values. It is about one thing, and how that one thing keeps families together during difficult times and eventually lands them money and Grammy awards.
The lack of any subtext forces my hand to further discuss the junk of the plot, which is a series of episodes that eventually, in the third act, comes across a dramatic arc: Hey, teen daughter Rebecca (Kirrilee Berger) can sing her little butt off! The Smallbones then unite to support her as she auditions for labels and songwriters and the like, the implication being, if she succeeds, the family will at least be saved on this mortal plane. Meanwhile, Joel Smallbone seems to have studied acting exclusively under the tutelage of the clenched-teeth emoji, because his grimacing performance reflects how so very often David must swallow his pride. There are many songs and almost as many bad wigs, and not enough emphasis on Helen as a complex character who deserves the gift bestowed upon her by the movie title. She’s supportive and tenacious and lives her life with grace and gratitude, but who is she, really, besides the wife and mother of successful music-business people? A good Christian woman, the movie insists, and not much else.
Our Call: Unless you’re a superfan of For King and Country fan, or god in general, Unsung Hero doesn’t have much to offer. SKIP IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
