Pirate Radio

Dialing up the rock 'n' ribaldry

November 13, 2009|Ty Burr, Globe Staff

Sometimes history just isn’t as much fun as it should be. “Pirate Radio,’’ a rowdy, mostly hilarious British comedy-drama about the offshore radio stations that blared rock ’n’ roll to a desperate young UK audience in the 1960s, would much rather show us a good time than stick to the facts. Writer-director Richard Curtis (“Love Actually’’) has made a party, not a movie, and if the party goes on much too long, at least the guests are great company and the host’s taste in music is impeccable.

Also: You can get a contact high just looking at the fashions. Not bad for a movie that takes place on a boat.

Some background for Yanks: The mid-’60s were a time of some of the greatest early British rock, and BBC Radio played none of it. If you wanted to hear the Beatles, the Stones, the Who - let alone the galvanic sounds pouring across the Atlantic from America - you had to tune in one of the handful of illegal stations broadcasting from rusty, repurposed fishing tubs in the international waters of the North Sea.

Pirate stations like Radio Caroline and Wonderful Radio London were listened to by millions, even as Beeb officials and government ministers fumed and plotted to put the pirates out of business. “Pirate Radio’’ - edited down from a longer British cut called “The Boat That Rocked’’ and presumably retitled to net careless US Johnny Depp fans - takes all this and fictionalizes it with high spirits and a nose for the tall tale.

Carl (Tom Sturridge) is our designated innocent, expelled from school and sent by his mother to live with family friend Quentin (Bill Nighy) aboard the good ship Radio Rock. Quentin - played with slumming aristocratic weariness as only Nighy can - oversees the crew of bad-boy deejays: tubby satyr Dave (Nick Frost), hapless Simon (Chris O’Dowd), Thick Kevin (Tom Brooke), space-case Bob (Ralph Brown), sexy Midnight Mark (Tom Wisdom), and so forth. The king of these waves is The Count (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a grandiloquent, hard-rocking American based loosely on a Radio One deejay named Emperor Rosko and played by Hoffman as an exuberant extension of his Lester Bangs in “Almost Famous.’’