Hey, everyone. Capone in Chicago here.

PIRATE RADIO (which was released everywhere else in the world as THE BOAT THAT ROCKED) is writer-director Richard Curtis' AMERICAN GRAFFITI. The difference being that Curtis is showing us his musical history and birth as a lifelong fan of rock n' roll from the perspective of the men who spun the platters and introduced a style of radio broadcast that UK radio had never seen before the late 1960s. Unlike George Lucas, Curtis didn't experience this music on the streets of his hometown where suped-up cars patrol the streets like animals on the hunt. No, Curtis heard The Kinks, The Rolling Stones, Dusty Springfield, pretty much every American R&B performer or group and, of course, The Beatles through a small transistor radio curled up in his room trying ever so desperately to find exactly the right frequency so that Jimi Hendrix's guitar could splash colors on his brain, or the Beach Boys would pump warm sunshine into his heart, or The Hollies would make him feel alive.

Pirate Radio certainly does have a bare-bones plot about member of the British government (represented by a minister played for broad laughs by Kenneth Branagh) attempting to shut down these kind of broadcaster by essentially passing new laws making it illegal for them to beam radio signals into the UK. But those scenes don't hold a candle to the sex, booze and general bad behavior of a group of DJs playing the best music in the world with all of Britain listening. At its core, the film is a series of vignettes of moments aboard Radio Rock, a crumbling tanker anchored in the North Sea. As the film begins, we meet Carl (newcomer Tom Sturridge), whose mother has sent him to work for the radio station's owner and Carl's godfather Quentin (the unstoppable Bill Nighy) as some sort of punishment for bad behavior in school.

As Carl gets to know the broadcasters and behind-the-scenes folks over the course of the many weeks he's on board, we see event after event played out, each one funnier than the last. The cast is jam packed with some truly talented and funny actors, including Chris O'Dowd, the mysteriously quiet Tom Wisdom, Tom Brooke, Ike Hamilton, newsman Will Adamsdale, Rhys Darby, the lesbian cook Katherine Parkinson, and the man who becomes Carl's sexual mentor, Dave, played to hairy, seductive perfection by Nick Frost. Topping off the splendidly chosen cast is Rhys Ifans' Gavin, who left Radio Rock for work in the States but is returning to reclaim his title as ratings champion on the station; and Philip Seymour Hoffman as the vessel's sole American, The Count, the elder statesman and voice of rock purity.

Curtis is smart enough to know when to just let his cast fly and be free, so there are several sequences that are clearly the result of improvisation and just as funny and poignant as the fully scripted scenes. There's a free-floating quality to the entire film--things just sort of glide effortlessly from one moment to the next. I know some people get hung up on the idea that unless a film has a forward-driven plot guiding it, it's not something worth seeing, and that's just ridiculous (and if Robert Altman were alive, he's slap you repeatedly). The moments I loved most in PIRATE RADIO (both in the film proper and the copious deleted scenes on the UK DVD) are the ones that don't forward the plot one iota. I could have watched these DJs and their antics for an eternity, if only because their behavior would have been accompanied by the greatest 24/7 soundtrack the world has ever known.

I want to spend a minute talking about a couple of performances, beginning with Hoffman, who is in many ways drawing from the same well he did playing Lester Bangs in Almost Famous. He is the authority; he's not quite God, but he'll do in a pinch; he is passion personified; and he is the one who understands that the main reason all of these men have gone to such lengths to play this music is that they are fans above all else--not just of the music they are playing but of the music that 10, 20, 30 years down the road, music they may never get a chance to play. Hoffman delivers a magnificent speech about just that at the end of the film, and it made me realize that there is music today that people feel just as strongly about and connect to as emotionally as folks did in the 1960s.

Tom Sturridge has the great fortune or misfortune of being our eyes into this transitional world. He's often such a silent observer that you don't even notice he's in the room unless someone is addressing him directly, but when you do spot him reacting to some bit of insanity, his reaction often mirrors exactly what we're feeling--shock, amazement, fear, disgust, lust and affection (and those are just the emotions he feels while trapped in a bathroom with a naked Nick Frost). He's a terrific stand-in for us, the viewer. A few choice beauties make their way onto the boat for some extended cameos, including January Jones, Gemma Arterton, Talulah Riley, and a surprisingly loose turn from Emma Thompson. As much as I love the constant site of sexy men crammed onto a small boat, seeing these stunning women made for a nice change of pace.

I guess in the UK, a fuss has been made about the historical accuracy of some of the events that occur in this movie, and frankly I couldn't give a shite. PIRATE RADIO isn't meant to be a documentary. As strange as it might sound, it's a fantasy film that peeks into Richard Curtis' mind and shows us an idealized (and yes, fictionalized at times) version of the events as he remembers them as a young man with a radio to his ear and a wild imagination about what was going on at the other end of that signal. Curtis has spent much of his career in TV and movies, creating such characters as "Black Adder" and "Mr. Bean" in his early years, and penning some remarkable British comedies that somehow often resulted in tears (FOUR WEDDINGS AND A FUNERAL, NOTTHING HILL, the BRIDGET JONES movies, THE GIRL IN THE CAFÉ, and his previous directing effort, LOVE ACTUALLY). I love that he's done something very different from what people consider a "Richard Curtis" production.

But more than that, I love that he's made a film about a love that very often lasts longer than most relationships. The impact of the music of our youth stays with us and influences us until the day we die. Other than maybe our parents, we can't say that about too many people. You can't break up with music, at least not easily. I came out of watching PIRATE RADIO with a rekindled romance with the music I grew up listening to, much of which I still sample quite frequently. It's one thing to be thinking about a movie for days after seeing it; it's quite another when that movie inspires you to take stock in a certain corner of your life and bring memories flooding back about what was happening to you when certain songs were at the peek of their popularity or what the first song you heard was when your first girlfriend broke up with you ("Against All Odds"--Phil Collins; just kill me now). My reaction to PIRATE RADIO was something more than just as a movie lover; it got me on a primal level I wasn't expecting and I loved it all the more for it.

-- Capone
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