One of my favorite personal interview outtakes involves Rob Zombie casually mentioning, by way of illustrating his point that a good film crosses all boundaries, that he thinks Love Actually is a terrific movie. It's a testament to writer/director Richard Curtis's firm grasp on the romantic comedy genre (though Love was the first film he directed, he wrote Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill, and Bridget Jones's Diary) that he was able to pilot it across that particular boundary; after years working in television on series like Black Adder and Mr. Bean, Curtis carved out a niche that was well-rewarded but also well-respected. With Pirate Radio (released several months ago in the UK as The Boat That Rocked) he leaves the sure footing of boy-meets-girl, modern London for a boat docked off the coast of England in 1966. The true story of the ships that sat just outside of UK waters, broadcasting the rock and roll songs the BBC refused to play on a pirated signal, seems like an unstoppable premise, and yet Curtis's film feels strangely anchored in the port: lots of activity on board but no forward motion.
More a series of songs set to images than vice versa, Pirate Radio opens with a zippy title sequence backed by the Kinks's "All Day and All of the Night." Young Carl's (Tom Sturridge) gadabout mother has offloaded him onto the pirate radio ship where his godfather Quentin (Bill Nighy) is overseeing a crew of DJs. The ship plays a non-stop rotation of the Stones, Who, Hendrix, and Kinks songs that the BBC, who had a monopoly on England's radio market, would only play for two hours a week. There is the sexy one (Tom Wisdom), the fat one (Nick Frost), the dumb one (Tom Brooke), the token American (Philip Seymour Hoffman), the amoral badass (Rhys Ifans) and a bunch more who all fall within Curtis's salty-to-sweet spectrum of masculinity. The women here (mostly seen as a boatload of stamping fillies imported monthly for sex) are either disappointing sluts or eye-rolling lesbians, but hey, man -- the '60s!
Curtis inserts several minor plotlines (Will Carl get laid? Find his real dad?) to the crowded inter-boat dynamic, but a lot of it feels -- perhaps purposefully -- like between-song filler. Worse is the addition of a one-note minister named Dormandy (Kenneth Branagh) intent on taking down pirate radio just because he can ("That's the point of being the government," he says, "If you don't like something you make up a law to stop it."). A cartoon villain with a lackey named "Twatt" (a dumb joke that made me laugh every time it is uttered, despite my very best efforts), Dormandy's embodiment of The Man feels superfluous: switching between the on- and off-boat drama saps rather than builds tension.
Images of young girls crowding around radios and young boys firing up transistors under their pillows are indelible and yet overused; somehow the connection between the DJs, the music, and the listeners doesn't translate. Similarly inert are two fleeting plotlines involving female characters who I am pretty sure were named Elenore (January Jones) and Marianne (Talulah Riley) solely so Curtis could play their corresponding Turtles and Leonard Cohen songs as theme music (he is especially hot for the "big entrance" song).
The pleasure of several of the performances mitigate much of the above: Bill Nighy is a dissolute dandy dream: "Have we met before?" he asks his godson. "There was a lost decade, so I have to check." And Ifans and Hoffman, alpha male brothers from very different mothers, play off of each other's absurd vanity to very funny effect during a pirate ship version of "chicken." A number of such sequences -- such as the one in which a space cadet DJ performs an underwater ballet, in an attempt to salvage records after the ship capsizes -- pass the time all right, with a chuckle here and there. For a film meant to evoke the rebel spirit that broke rock and roll into the mainstream, that doesn't quite cut it.