All things great and small as Brit rockers rock on, and the Establishment be damned

Rating: 8/10 (3 January 2010)

In the mid-Sixties English rock ruled the world. But strangely, it was almost completely banned from mainstream English radio: the BBC only allowed it to be broadcast two hours a week. To fill the gap, a group of rakish misfits manned an offshore station on a boat just outside UK territorial waters to broadcast rock music day and night, and 25 million Brits stayed tuned. This movie about that effort, so essential to the cultural life of the sceptered isle, is punctuated with vignettes of listeners, which contribute mightily to the period flavor. Another undertone obligato is of slimy Government meanies plotting the mighty little station's destruction. Radio Rock wasn't doing anything technically illegal, but the English government appointed a humorless secretary, who in turn delegated an eager younger spoilsport with the unsubtle joke name Twatt (Jack Davenport), to find a way to shut down the enterprise.
Note: this station and the others that followed suit was not an eleemosynary or revolutionary deal but a money-making operation. The broadcast rockers needed to please their sponsors as well as their listeners, and the style was more crude than artsy. As the story's told here, the Count (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is the only American disk jockey on board, but he's the most passionate about the music, and in a memorable speech he declares that they've been living the best time of their lives and if they go down, it'll have been worth it.
This little movie, whose original title is The Boat That Rocked, tells a story of the station's life, its heart, and its struggle to stay afloat that's more anecdotal than historical. This is an old-fashioned English ensemble piece top-heavy with colorful, eccentric characters. It unfolds as a series of cute, risqué tales focusing alternately on different members of the radio crew, all male, save one lesbian lady, and mostly horny. Richard Curtis directed the highly successful Hugh Grant vehicle Love, Actually as well as Four Weddings and a Funeral and Notting Hill. He turns from romance to sexual innuendo here, and from hit-making to something more personal and quirky. . With the help of an appealing cast that includes Bill Nighy, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Rhys Ifans, Nick Frost, Kenneth Branagh, and Tom Sturridge, he keeps the action at all times at least mildly amusing, rounding things out with a rousing finale in which total disaster is narrowly averted. None of the stories seems very urgent -- not even of how a bird dumps her groom after 17 hours for the main British disk jockey (Hoffman is his chief rival), or how Young Carl (Sturridge) loses his virginity and finds his lost dad and then saves him from descending forever into the briny deep carrying a big wooden box of bad rock albums. But as the Government efforts to sink the boat become literal, the movie's energy level rises exponentially. If that isn't sufficient to arouse interest, the song-rich sound track and the end-credit collage, with its panoply of classic vinyl album covers, is enough to send aging rockers out into the lobby tearful, nostalgic, and happy.
The emphasis is decidedly upon the sexual in this nearly all-male gathering. Carl has been sent into the care of his godfather Quentin (Nighy) after being expelled from a posh school. The project then becomes to rid him of his virginity but that is sidetracked by sex-starved older competitors as well as his own excessive public school sense of fair play. Carl's efforts are thwarted by Shawn of the Dead's Nick Frost, as a DJ whose corpulence doesn't impede his ability to seduce women. Another major episode is of the chap who marries a girl, only to learn she's shacking up with the station's most famous and rakish announcer, DJ Gavin (Ifans), a sleek, shades-wearing seducer type, who makes salacious love to the microphone and every woman in the audience (and we see them salivate and swoon). Gavin's dramatic and much-publicized return to the station after a hiatus pushes down the Count a peg or two in the station's pecking order.
The intramural rivalries become moot as the effort of the government bigwig Sir Alistair Dormandy (Branagh) is stepped up. I cannot reveal details of the finale, but it's tumultuous and, for a small movie, impressively choreographed as well as touching. Pirate Radio is a movie that meanders toward the inconsequential, and then redeems itself with a sense of nothing less than the power of music to unite souls and transform consciousness, during the one period in memory when such unity and transformation was certifiably happening on a wide scale in the English-speaking world. So if this is very far from a great movie, it's still a movie one can have a little corner of affection forg-- and Ifans' salacious announcer is one irresistibly sleazy attention-getter, Hoffman as always a strong presence, and Sturridge clearly soon to be a major new hottie. In addition to the actors mentioned already, the field is deepened by the appearance of Chris O'Dowd, January Jones and a superficially disguised Emma Thompson, who plays Carl's mother. But for those who find the characters hard to keep track of, perhaps the real star of the show is the seventy-odd rock classics that enliven the sound track.