Excellent music from The Kinks, The Turtles, Procul Harum, The Who and plenty more helps keep Pirate Radio afloat

Pirate Radio

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Aside from Pirate Radio, Richard Curtis’s sole directorial effort is 2003’s Love Actually, a romantic comedy that made a virtue of its dedication to sheer genre excess. No surprise, then, that his followup is indulgent to a fault. Released overseas in April as The Boat That Rocked, the film was widely panned thanks to its excessive run time and slack pacing. The North American version of Pirate Radio is a good 20 minutes shorter, and cutting the extra weight seems to have helped.

Set in the mid-1960s, the film centres on Carl (Tom Sturridge), a teen who, after getting expelled from school, is sent by his mother to learn to straighten up on his godfather’s ship. This is about the worst imaginable way to reform a child, considering the godfather is Quentin (Bill Nighy), a likably slimy hipster, and the ship is home to the immensely popular pirate radio station, Radio Rock.

The station’s DJs border on WKRP in Cincinnati at times, but the uniformly strong cast makes the cartoonish characters work. Nick Frost (Simon Pegg’s buddy in Sean of the Dead and Hot Fuzz) plays against type as the portly yet suave Dave, while Rhys Ifans is suitably cocksure as the beloved and lusted-after “king of the airwaves.” Philip Seymour Hoffman as The Count essentially reprises his role as Lester Bangs in Almost Famous, exuding a mix of ineffable coolness and pure music geekery sure to inspire jealousy in a solid chunk of CJSW DJs.

For both the station and the film, though, the real star is the music. A 24-hour rock station like Radio Rock never actually existed in Britain’s heyday of pirate radio, but Curtis’s imaginary station is pretty damned appealing. The soundtrack spends equal time on both sides of the Atlantic, adopting The Kinks’ “All Day and All of the Night” as its unofficial theme and putting The Turtles’ “Elenore,” The Who’s “I Can See For Miles” and Procul Harum’s “A Whiter Shade of Pale” to excellent use. At times, Curtis seems to be more concerned with the soundtrack than the storyline, and chunks of the film are devoted to random shots of listeners dancing in their bedrooms, but for fans of the era, that likely won’t matter.

That’s mostly because, at least until the third act, the plot hardly matters. A parallel story about a government official (played with superhuman peevishness by Kenneth Branagh) trying to shut down pirate radio never quite connects with the action on the boat; rather than adding tension, it just distracts from the fun. But as the end credits make abundantly clear, Pirate Radio isn’t so much about storytelling as it is a love letter to ’60s pop, and on that level at least, it’s certainly seaworthy.