“Pirate Radio” (my 0-10 rating: 5)

Genre: Comedy

Director: Richard Curtis

Screenplay: Richard Curtis

Cast: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Bill Nighy, Rhys Darby, Rhys Ifans, Nick Frost, Kenneth Branagh, Tom Sturridge, Talulah Riley, January Jones

Time: 2 hrs., 15 min.

Rating: R (for language, and some sexual content including brief nudity)

What to expect? Nostalgia, that’s what.

Hey, having been a part of the ’60s, I can love it. But only for the music memories, nothing else. What we’ve got here in “Pirate Radio” (originally “The Boat That Rocked” in its openings abroad) is mindless, disorganized comic rambling amid colorful characters, well-performed, but with a hopelessly lame plot. God, the memories are sure there. But that’s all.

Loaded with solid Brit performers and one terrific Yank, flowing with major energy on a course to nowhere, the film just hands all responsibility for audience communication to its great pop songs of the day. It sports an effervescent, boundlessly charming impudence with in-your-face jokes, avoiding even a mild attempt at a dicey relationship. It’s good beatin’ feet for those who were 60s teenagers, with a fair share of potty humor.

The film also has a burdensome amount of screen time, overestimating its primary value as a partyin’ movie. There is no consistent tone. It is aimless except as a portrayal of youth turning against a pretentious, pompous world of adults by integrating a new form of music that not only defined, but was their very being.

Writer-director Richard Curtis fabricates a tale of desperate youth yearning for the free expression of Rock in a battle with stuffy, unyielding, entrenched reactionaries. Except that it never gets to be a story.

Here we are in 1966 to see Carl (Tom Sturridge), recently expelled from school, now shipped off by his mum (Emma Thompson) to go out and find himself. He’s to stay with his godfather, Quentin (Bill Nighy), who operates a (fictional) pirate radio station in the North Sea named Radio Rock beyond official British waters. Carl will learn that actually one of the outrageous individuals aboard is his dad, his job to figure out which.

Carl, who has never seen, nor known the identity of, his father, now finds himself in a new school of life, one populated by eccentric deejays, the top dog of which is The Count (Philip Seymour Hoffman). This guy airs daily to 25 million Brit youths who feel deprived of rock in Britain’s greatest era of that music. (In actuality pirate radio stations were quite legal. By technical means, the government just jammed them, but later, seeing the money to be made, the BBC, with the best DJs going, co-opted rock and made it legit.)

In the film, when the government views the broadcasts as threats to English morality, Minister Darmody (Kenneth Branagh) makes it his personal mission to legally annihilate Radio Rock and everybody involved. Darmody, to make things more dicey, is young Carl’s unknown father. The BBC was under contract to produce solely live music, thus leaving only 45 minutes a day to playtime for rock.

The ship of quirky fanatics is run by slick-suited, shaded Quentin (Bill Nighy) who sees his job as maintaining order. But of course it’s a world of rock aboard this vessel and zany capers are the order. Quentin first loves freedom over what he sees as the soul-less British establishment.

Bill Nighy is a gem of cool and Philip Seymore Hoffman is amazing in the way he always chooses the most pitch perfect roles for himself.

bride and groom gifts