This Is the Best Movie About Country Music

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Jun 18, 8:30AM EDT

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This Is the Best Movie About Country Music — © Bettmann / Getty Images

Country music is among the most listened-to music genres. It has its own Hall of Fame, its own national, annual awards ceremony and its own Billboard charts. Some of its biggest stars, like Johnny Cash, are among the best know entertainers in American history.

It is only smart for entertainment companies to mix country movies with films. It is part of the kind of winning combination of contemporary music overall and movie, that helped stars like Elvis to become even bigger stars.

24/7 Tempo has identified the best movie for fans of country music based on critic and user ratings. Each film offers we looked at has something special for music fans, especially those drawn to the narrative qualities of country and western. Many of these films we considered feature well-known country performers in dramatic roles.

To determine the best movies for fans of country music, 24/7 Tempo created an index based on each film’s Rotten Tomatoes average critic rating, Rotten Tomatoes average audience rating and IMDb average user rating. The Internet Movie Database is an online movie database owned by Amazon, while Rotten Tomatoes is an online movie and TV review aggregator. To be considered, each film needed to have some connection to country music, either thematically or with regard to the talent involved.
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According to this analysis, “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” made in 1980, is the best movie for country music fans. Directed by Michael Apted, the 124-minute film stars Sissy Spacek, Tommy Lee Jones and Levon Helm. It tells the story of Loretta Lynn, from her youth “in a cabin on a hill in Butcher Holler” through her rise to country superstardom. Anchored by an Oscar-winning lead performance by Spacek (who in 1983 would release her own country music album), the movie is a must-see for fans of Lynn and the country genre. In 2019, the movie was selected by the Library of Congress for inclusion in the National Film Registry.

Click here to see all the best movies for country music fans.
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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.