MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Cheatin’ Hearts’: An Achy Breaky Story : The cowboy love theme leans heavily on country-Western cliche.

“Sometimes life is like a country-Western song,” says one of the characters in “Cheatin’ Hearts” (selected theaters). Is this supposed to buy off how country-cornball this movie is?

Country-themed films--such as the recent “Pure Country,” starring George Strait--often attempt to be movie equivalents of the country-Western weepies on the hit parade. They’re meant to fill out the heartbreak in the lyrics in the way that a novelization fills out a movie scenario. You have to be real big on country-Western cliche to get much out of “Cheatin’ Hearts.”

Jenny Stevenson (Sally Kirkland) was ditched by her rapscallion husband Henry (James Brolin) a year ago but she still carries a (sputtering) torch for him. He’s been shacking up in Dallas with a curvaceous stockbroker (Laura Johnson) and running a Caddie dealership. When he shows up unannounced for the wedding of his doting youngest daughter (Renee Estevez), he receives from Jenny the obligatory slap-that-stuns-the-crowd-into-silence.

Samantha (Pamela Gidley), his other, less-forgiving, daughter, is also in town for the wedding. She’s been living in bad ol’ New York City studying classical piano at Juilliard. She’s confused returning to her roots and the cowboy love she left behind. But that’s the price you pay for getting hooked up with varmints like Chopin and Liszt.

Jenny is a classic stand-by-your-man mid-40s wife who, of course, in time-honored fashion, gets ditched by her man. Samantha, who doesn’t put up with such pre-feminist shenanigans, bristles at her father’s antics. Like mother not like daughter.

It seems like at least once every half-hour someone in this movie, usually Jenny or Samantha or Henry, is storming out of a pickup and having a big yell out on the road. There’s a heap o’ arguin’ in “Cheatin’ Hearts” (Times-rated Mature for language, theme and brief nudity). (The writer-director is Rod McCall, a TV commercial veteran.) Still, the ranting is preferable to the ultra-mellow scenes involving Kris Kristofferson as the Sympathetic Cowboy who helps Jenny pick up the pieces. Kristofferson is playing a Westerner so mythically too-good-to-be-true that he seems bronzed. He should be in the Good Guy Hall of Fame.

This isn’t one of those Sally Kirkland movies of late where she’s required to drop her decolletage every other scene; she’s trying for homespun dignity here but she’s best when she’s primed to claw Henry’s eyes. Brolin, as he also demonstrated in “Gas Food Lodging,” can be ingratiatingly hang-loose. He at least makes it clear why Jenny still can’t get over him. Gidley has a fine, tense presence in a couple of scenes. You keep hoping her character will find a way to reconcile Juilliard with Country. Maybe she could rescore the “Moonlight” Sonata for banjo?

‘Cheatin’ Hearts’

James Brolin: Henry

Sally Kirkland: Jenny

Pamela Gidley: Samantha

Kris Kristofferson: Tom

A Trimark Pictures release of a King/Moonstone presentation. Director Rod McCall. Producer Catherine Wanek. Executive producers Sally Kirkland, James Brolin. Screenplay by Rod McCall. Cinematographer Barry Markowitz. Editor Curtis Edge. Costumes Leslie Daniel Rainer. Music George S. Clinton. Production design Susan Brand. Art director Stuart Blatt. Running time: 1 hour, 46 minutes.

Times-rated Mature (language, theme, brief nudity).