Lots of fun if all over the place

Rating: 8/10 (20 March 2010)

"The Boat that Rocked" or "Pirate Radio" is a 2009 film about a time in the U.K. where rock music was not allowed to be played on the BBC. This gave rise to a widely listened to pirate radio station that broadcast from a ship inhabited by some dedicated deejays and technicians.
The film stars Philip Seymour Hoffman, Kenneth Branagh, Bill Nighy, Tom Sturridge, Rhys Ifans, January Jones, Emma Thompson, Chris O'Dowd, Nick Frost, and Ralph Brown, and is directed with a fairly loose hand by Richard Curtis.
The result is a fun movie with a terrific '60s soundtrack. The characters are wild: There's Quentin (Nighy), the ship's captain, an American called The Count (Hoffman), Gavin, the star DJ (Ifans), Felicity, the lesbian cook (Katherine Parkinson), Simon (O'Dowd), the dawn treading DJ, Bob, whom no one meets until he's been on the ship for 7 months, Dr. Dave (Frost), and Carl (Sturridge), Quentin's godson, who has been sent to live there after being expelled from school. They party hard and broadcast harder, and young Carl has his first experience with women and also makes it through a visit by his mother (Thompson). Meanwhile, on dry land, the policymakers (led by Branagh) are determined to make a law to close down pirate radio.
There are several subplots in the film, one including Mad Men's January Jones as a bride, and Carl's search for his father. The film is a little all over the place and disorganized, but that may have been intentional to portray the atmosphere of the ship and characters.
Baby boomers like myself should love it, as well as younger audiences. Because of the music and the audience on land listening to it, "Pirate Radio" has the unmistakable ambiance of youth.