Scattershot satire at least unveils one terrific new talent Robert Altman's sprawling put-down of the Capitol of Country Music features a headache-inducing amount of overlapping dialogue recorded in a fuzzy, pseudo-documentary manner. Add to that an over-abundance of "colorful" characters and muddy cinematography, and "Nashville" almost self-destructs before the second-half. Thank God then for some really fine performances by Henry Gibson(as a Conway Twitty-type), Lily Tomlin, Shelley Duvall and Keenan Wynn(in the film's most moving sub-plot), Gwen Welles as a would-be singer who ends up stripping, and Ronee Blakely(as a Loretta Lynn-type). Who could forget Ronee's breakdown in front of an outdoor audience, her sanity slowly slipping away as she babbles on happily about "The Wizard Of Oz". Otherwise, film is DATED, ugly, sour, and very very shrill. I remember reviews of it in 1975 were downright split between glorious and hateful. I fall somewhere in the middle, I guess. You simply can't fault a film that begins with a commercial of it's own soundtrack(clever...almost too clever), not to mention a vehicle for the talents of Blakely, who never got this kind of chance ever again.