You know what happens when Hollywood tries to cash in on the blues, toss in a karate kid, and pepper it with a splash of Faustian drama? You get Crossroads, a movie so confused about what it wants to be that it ends up being none of it. It’s like someone asked ChatGPT 1.0 to generate a blues myth on a Commodore 64 while blasting Stevie Ray Vaughan. The result? A cinematic casserole that’s undercooked, underwritten, and only occasionally worth tapping your foot to—usually by accident.
🎬 The Premise: Deal with the Devil? Sure. But Let’s Make It Corny.
Ralph Macchio plays Eugene Martone, a classical guitar student at Juilliard who is also obsessed with the blues. That sentence alone should tell you we’re in for a wild ride on the Sincerity Express. Macchio’s character is supposedly brilliant—he plays Paganini in his spare time—but he’s just dying to find that one lost song by Robert Johnson. Because nothing says “blues authenticity” like a kid from Long Island with perfect hair and no discernible inner torment.
His solution? Break an old man out of a nursing home and take him on a cross-country journey to the Mississippi Delta like it’s The Blues Brothers: Junior Varsity Edition.
👴 Enter Willie Brown: Wisdom or Whimsy?
Joe Seneca plays Willie Brown, a crusty old harmonica player who claims to have known Robert Johnson personally. Willie’s got secrets, sass, and plot-relevant gaps in memory. He’s also got a knack for waxing poetic about the blues, like a fortune cookie with a nicotine problem.
Willie agrees to help Eugene—reluctantly, of course—only because he wants help settling a little matter down South. That “matter,” it turns out, involves a deal with the Devil. But more on that nonsense later.
The two set off on a road trip from New York to Mississippi, forming the least convincing buddy duo since Turner & Hooch, except at least Hooch had charisma.
🛣 The Road Trip That Goes Nowhere
This is where the movie should have leaned into the dirt, the grime, the Southern Gothic weirdness of it all. But nope. What we get is a sanitized bus tour through cliché-ville.
They hitchhike, steal rides, and strum their way through a musical montage or two. Along the way, Eugene runs into Frances (Jami Gertz), a runaway with a tragic backstory the movie barely touches. She’s supposed to bring out Eugene’s emotional side, but mostly she just brings out the audience’s confusion. She shows up, flirts a bit, kisses him, and then disappears like a phantom who got bored halfway through a subplot.
Her character is so thinly written she might as well be credited as “Generic Female Catalyst #3.”
🎵 The Music: The Blues Gets a Hollywood Makeover
Now let’s talk about the music—because if there’s anything this film should have gotten right, it’s the sound. Steve Vai makes an appearance as Jack Butler, a leather-clad guitar-slinging demon who challenges Eugene to a duel at the crossroads, because of course he does.
This scene is supposed to be the climax—a fiery showdown of soul versus speed. Except it feels more like a Guitar Center demo battle between a jazz major and a guy who just chugged a Monster energy drink. The technical skill is there, sure, but the blues? The pain? The rawness? Missing. Replaced with arpeggios and fretboard gymnastics.
You don’t get to say “I beat the Devil” with a well-executed sweep-picking solo. That’s not blues, that’s a Berklee audition.
😈 The Devil You Say?
Let’s talk about Scratch, the Devil character who shows up near the end. Played by Robert Judd with some gravitas, he still feels like he wandered in from a better movie. He’s supposed to be sinister, tempting, menacing. But this Devil is less “Prince of Darkness” and more “Creepy Uncle Who Owns a Pawn Shop.”
When the time comes for the final showdown, Eugene’s soul is on the line—but so are our patience and suspension of disbelief. The stakes feel tacked on, the tension manufactured. And again: the climactic battle is just two guys shredding like it’s America’s Got Talent: Infernal Edition. Not exactly O Brother, Where Art Thou.
🎭 Macchio the Guitar Hero?
It’s hard to knock Ralph Macchio too much. He tries. He really does. But his delivery throughout the movie wavers between bewildered tourist and wide-eyed teen at a blues cosplay convention. He’s supposed to be a Juilliard prodigy, but he comes off like a kid who just learned his first pentatonic scale and won’t stop playing it during lunch.
There’s no grit. No grime. No reason to believe he’s got the blues beyond his Spotify playlist. His character never feelstransformed by the journey, which is the point of a movie like this. Instead, he ends the film the same way he started—only now he’s got a new riff and a slightly more tragic harmonica friend.
⚖️ The Tone: A Movie With No Soul
Crossroads is unsure what it wants to be. A coming-of-age story? A supernatural morality play? A musical journey through the Deep South? It touches on all these themes and then promptly drops them in favor of another slow-motion guitar close-up.
It’s a movie about the blues that never gets its hands dirty. Everyone’s too clean, too pretty, too neatly scripted. There’s no sense of chaos or danger—just a safe, studio-produced take on what someone thinks the blues are about.
You know that scene in a sitcom where the dad picks up a guitar and says “Let me show you how it’s done, son,” before cranking out a few chords? That’s this movie for 99 minutes.
🧟♂️ What Could’ve Saved It?
A little mess. A little madness. A little authenticity. Instead of sending a Juilliard student to “learn” the blues, why not make the story about someone who’s lived it? Instead of a Devil who looks like he needs a nap, why not a true, malevolent force with real charisma?
And instead of casting Macchio, maybe just lean into an unknown with a little grit in their teeth and calloused fingers.
Also, stop trying to teach us that classical musicians can suddenly out-blues the Devil in a single jam session. That’s not character growth. That’s wishful thinking from someone who failed Music Theory II.
🏁 Final Thoughts: Crossed Wires, Missed Chords
Crossroads had the ingredients: a legend of the Delta blues, a haunted harmonica man, a devil lurking at a dusty fork in the road. But what it served up was a microwaved morality tale that confused fretboard speed with soul.
It’s not terrible. It’s just hollow. It’s the kind of movie that plays at 2AM on cable and makes you say, “Oh yeah, this was a thing,” before falling asleep halfway through.
The blues is about pain. It’s about love, loss, and the messiness in between. Crossroads is about a kid learning to solo better so he can outshred a demon.
That’s not the blues.
That’s Guitar Hero on easy mode.
⭐ Final Rating: 2 out of 5 Bottleneck Slides
One star for Joe Seneca. One for Steve Vai’s face-melting cameo. Zero for the rest of it.
