By Anthony Breznican, USA TODAY  is like a freshly opened bag of potato chips.  You start talking about one movie — in this case his new country-western musical drama, Crazy Heart— and quickly you're on to another: The Fabulous Baker Boys, a very different musical film, which leads to Heaven's Gate, in which he met music maestro T Bone Burnett and some of the others who helped craft the songs for Crazy Heart.  The Big Lebowski comes up, of course — along with the possibility of a sequel. Then his breakthrough in The Last Picture Show, his childhood roles on dad Lloyd Bridges' 1960s TV adventure Sea Hunt, big-budget experiments like Tronand King Kong, and how the sci-fi drama Starman made him turn down the lead role in Big.  Pretty soon that potato chip bag is empty, man. You've devoured the whole filmography.  By the way, Bridges sounds so much like The Dude from The Big Lebowski, with his rhythmic scatterings of "cool" and "man," it doesn't take long to find yourself adopting that parlance, too.  At 60, he has been making movies and TV shows for more than half a century. But good luck trying to define what a Jeff Bridges movie is.  "It feels like, well ... ," Bridges scratches his woolly beard. He's sitting on the wooden deck of a small beach bungalow in Malibu his father bought for the family when he hit it big on Sea Hunt. There's an acoustic guitar sitting beside him, which makes it onto his lap when he wants to demonstrate a song.  "That decision-making process about what you're going to do is an interesting one," Bridges says. "How do I describe it, it's uh ... I'm attracted to what I'm afraid of, and I'm afraid of what I'm attracted to. It kind of goes on at the same time.  "Crazy Heart, for instance: very attractive. You get to do your music, yeah — but you can (mess) that up. Right now it's safe, because it's a fantasy. But if you do it and (mess) it up, that's going to be painful. Yeah, yeah, so maybe I shouldn't do it. ... But, if you don't do it, you're going to always wish you did. Yeah ... but what if I don't catch that long ball?"  Opening in limited release Wednesday, Crazy Heart tells the story of Bad Blake, a fallen country star who ekes out a living at dive bars and bowling alleys, looking for love with a single mom (Maggie Gyllenhaal) and brooding over the superstar success of a kid he once mentored (Colin Farrell). Though Blake can still rock, every performance tends to be a duet with booze.  'A bit of the trickster'  Bridges had done only one major musical film before, 1989's The Fabulous Baker Boys. He co-starred with his older brother Beau as two slick pianists who are torn over the same jazz singer, played by Michelle Pfeiffer.  "That was a great experience for a number of reasons. One, the chance to work with my brother and Michelle, but also all that great music, these great jazz standards, which is very much unlike Crazy Heart," Bridges says. "I turned the movie down when it first came along, because having done Baker Boys, I put the bar really high."  Then Burnett, the legendary musician, historian and producer (most famously of the roots music in 2000's O Brother, Where Art Thou?), signed on to craft Crazy Heart's music. He and Bridges were friends after working together nearly 30 years ago on the Western drama Heaven's Gate, a notoriously expensive box-office bomb at the time.  (After the premiere, Bridges recalls, "you heard this terrible applause that sounded like popcorn that's starting to go off but never crescendos ... and then somebody pulls the plug and says, 'Let's not have popcorn.' ")  Burnett played in that movie's 1890s-era frontier band and bonded with Bridges over music. "Invariably, a visit with Jeff has always led to playing music," Burnett says. "He's got a bit of the trickster in him."  Bridges says Burnett talked him into Crazy Heart, but Burnett cautions: "I don't know if I talked him into it. But I knew if he would actually do this part, we had a chance of making it a good movie. So it was this kind of I'll-do-it-if-you'll-do-it thing."  They wrote the music with John Goodwin, a Nashville songwriter Bridges has known since the fourth grade, and Burnett's friend Stephen Bruton, a veteran guitarist and nomadic musician who died from cancer shortly after the film was finished.  Directed by first-time feature filmmaker Scott Cooper, Crazy Heart was slated to come out in 2010 until Fox Searchlight decided that it might have Oscar potential. Positive early reviews have backed up the chances of a statue for Bridges, who has been nominated four times.  On Sunday, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association gave Bridges its best-actor award and honored Burnett and Bruton for best music/score. The Boston Society of Film Critics Sunday gave Crazy Heart its award for best use of music in a film.  "The studio has been touting (Bridges' work) as the performance of a lifetime, and in a way it is," says Kris Tapley, who profiled the actor for the awards-season blog InContention.com. "It's definitely a fantastic performance in the middle of Oscar season that reminds you he has been plugging away for years, but still doesn't have an Oscar."  And Bridges seems disinterested in that legacy.  "He has never been looking for the next star role," Tapley says. "Instead, he's looking for whatever might grab him. If that happens to be playing a bald, bearded villain in Iron Man, that's what it is. If it's playing a country-western singer at the center of the film, that's fine, too.  "But I don't think many of the roles in his past have been as reflective as this one. What's great is that he can still deliver a unique performance in 2009 after working since the '60s."  You can guess a person's tastes by finding out his or her favorite Jeff Bridges movies.  First off, pretty much everybody loves 1998's The Big Lebowski, which comes the closest to being THE definitive Bridges. He's reuniting with Lebowski writer/directors Joel and Ethan Coen for a remake of the Western True Grit, but he knows that also will lead to fan hopes for a sequel.  "I like the idea of sequels. It's fun to come back," Bridges says, though he hasn't done many. "I'd be up for it if the brothers were."  But if you're a political junkie? Your favorite Bridges movie is likely The Contender (2000), with his laid-back-but-shrewd U.S. president who nominates an embattled woman as his new vice president. (It earned Bridges his fourth and most recent Oscar nomination.) He remembers writer/director Rod Lurie pitching it to him as: " 'It's The Dude as The Prez!' What a wonderful juxtaposition."  Sports fans may rally behind Bridges as a race-car driver in The Last American Hero (1973) or his racehorse owner in Seabiscuit (2003), and literature fans lean toward his philandering writer in The Door in the Floor (2004), based on part of John Irving's novel A Widow For One Year.  For computer geeks, it has to be 1982's video-game adventure Tron — and they're eagerly awaiting next December's sequel, Tron Legacy. Fantasy lovers dig his 1976 remake of King Kong, though it has been eclipsed by Peter Jackson's 2005 remake.  "Those were maybe big-budgeted, tent-pole movies of that era, but I didn't think of them in that way," he says. "To me, they were capricious choices on my part. With King Kong, the kid in me said, 'I get to be in that movie I loved to watch.' And Tron was the similar thing. The kid in me responded to the idea of being sucked inside a computer."  Cinephiles dig his edgier work, like the disgraced shock-jock seeking redemption in The Fisher King (1991), the plane-crash survivor in Fearless (1993) or the Texas kid without much future in The Last Picture Show (1971) — his second film, which brought his first Oscar nomination. "Unlike now, where everybody including myself is courting the media to get an award, in that day I didn't do anything," he says with a laugh. "I just woke up one morning and somebody called to say, 'Yeah, you've been nominated.' It was all a big surprise."  Action fans cheered him on as Clint Eastwood's bank-robbing sidekick in Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974, his second Oscar nomination), while romance seekers swooned over his heartthrob phase inAgainst All Odds(1984), Jagged Edge (1985) and Starman (1984).  That last role, as an alien visitor trying to study humans, earned him his third Oscar bid, and also led him to drop out of one of the decade's other big movies, Big, which went on in 1988 to star Tom Hanks as a boy who magically grows up overnight.  "Maybe I'd spent those childlike qualities in Starman," Bridges says. "I just didn't feel it, man. And I think it was the right choice, because Tom just kicked it, man."  His father, who died in 1998, inspired him to always mix it up. "My father pulled that Sea Hunt character off so well, people thought he was a skin diver who'd been taught to act," Bridges says. "Developing that strong persona kind of hamstrung him. He got a lot of skin-diving role offers, but they didn't know he was a Shakespearean actor or sang on Broadway."  He acted with his father in Tucker: The Man and His Dream (1988) and the bomb-squad thriller Blown Away (1994), but Bridges first performed with his dad by taking small parts in Sea Hunt.  "He would come to me and say, 'Hey, there's a part in there for a little kid; you want to be in it?' I'd say 'ehhh' .... And he would say, 'You get to be out of school!' " Bridges says with a laugh. "Then he'd say, 'You get to make some money and buy some toys.' Yeah, he was pimping me hard, man!"  His father taught him acting, but as a kid he remembers it as a kind of playtime with the old man. "That's basically what acting was — Advanced Pretend."  His brother Beau remembers that as kids, the duo would stage street theater and perform songs in the back of a flatbed truck in supermarket parking lots. "We'd pull in and immediately stage a fight so people would crowd around," Beau says. "Then we'd do our thing."  Though music didn't become the main event for either of the acting brothers, it has always been a passion. Baker Boys was a chance to show that off. Now Crazy Heart is, too.  Beau says his brother isn't all that different from Lebowski or Bad Blake: flawed men who nonetheless have what it takes to stay on the high wire of life.  "One of the endearing things about my brother, and I think it's the same for an audience watching him as a character, is he seems to be able to walk the straight line and stumble at the same time," he says.  "Right when you think he's out of control, he's totally focused. It's uncanny, but I think we can all relate to it because down deep we all have trouble walking the straight line. Here's a guy who not only gets there, but goes out beyond where everybody else goes."  You share in the USA TODAY community, so please keep your comments smart and civil. Don't attack other readers personally, and keep your language decent. Use the "Report Abuse" button to make a difference.
Jeff Bridges is stretching out artistically in 'Crazy Heart' and Oscar talk is beginning to build about his performance.