I recommend Thomas Cobb's book, too : Crazy Heart

Finally saw "Crazy Heart," based on the novel Crazy Heart, by Thomas Cobb. (Let's give all writers the credit they deserve!) It's an entertaining, very well done movie - clearly it's Jeff Bridges's show in every way because the movie is entirely character-focused, and entirely on his character, everyone else is a foil. The book, too, was primarily about the character Bad Blake, his fall from grace and his struggle for redemption. The structure of the movie is a little tighter than the novel, eliminating many of the road stops and the side trip to LA to connect with his estranged son - and that's all to the good. I won't be giving anything away here in noting that the movie considerably softens the hard ending of the novel - Bad makes a serious run an sobriety, and he has a friendly reconciliation with his girlfriend (Jane? - Maggie Gyllenhall), though it's not the Hollywood ending that I'd feared - they don't get back together. Though Gyllenhall is pretty good in the part, her character is the weakness in the film, as she's not played as a single mom likely to fall hard for an obvious drunk and failure - she's far too cleancut and well-scrubbed and we never quite believe she would make such terrible decisions. A great strength of the film is the music - I hope the current edition of the book also comes with a CD - all sounding good, but, though I'm no expert on modern country, it seems that it's all in the 21st-century style, much closer to pop or blues, and not at all in the style of the late '80s, when the film is set (the book is set in the early '80s). Cobb's novel has lots of detail about the life of a road musician and about the c/w business, which the movie can't delve into, so if you want to go deeper into the life of Bad Blake I recommend the novel Crazy Heart, source of the movie Crazy Heart starring Jeff Bridges.