Metacritic reviews

It's a pleasant, unprepossessing picture of gliding charm and buoyant silliness, a fragile craft unencumbered by the weighty sophistication of camp, and it's one of the nicest surprises of the season. [17 Dec 1982]

It is a guileless tribute not only to plain values of plain people in Depression America, but also to the sweet spirit of country-and-western music before it got all duded up for the urban cowboys.

This is a sweet, whimsical, low-key movie, a movie that makes you feel good without pressing you too hard.

The whole thing veers wildly in quality, and no Eastwood-hater should go within a mile of it; but few lovers of American cinema could fail to be moved by a venture conceived so recklessly against the spirit of its times.

Though the film is obviously coated with a veneer of nostalgic sentimentality, Eastwood never lets Honkytonk Man veer into maudlin territory.

Unfortunately, the film suffers from the weak script's predictable situations and underdeveloped characters, and the pathos and cliches become hard to take, making Honkytonk Man more of a curiosity piece for followers of Eastwood than a truly compelling story.

Only charm and sentimentality could have brought the requisite magic to Clint Eastwood's Honkytonk Man; unfortunately, this well-intentioned but weak film hasn't nearly enough of either.

Honkytonk Man is one of those well-intentioned efforts that doesn't quite work. It seems that Clint Eastwood took great pains in telling this story of an aging, struggling country singer but he is done in by the predictability of the script [from Clancy Carlile's own novel] and his own limitations as a warbler.

A more modest, down-to-earth disappointment than Firefox, it benefits from a fair amount of incidental entertainment value, much of it supplied by a distinctive and often humorous supporting cast. [18 Dec 1982, p.C4]

A soppy songfest about a tubercular pea picker who drives to Nashville, where he hemorrhages and dies. It's unfit for human consumption. [17 Dec 1982, p.20]