The Boat That Rocked

Wednesday 1st April 2009, 8:51AM BST.

Ever since Hugh Grant and his floppy fringe bumbled through Four Weddings And A Funeral, screenwriter Richard Curtis hasn’t just been taking the nation’s romantic pulse – he has been encouraging it to race out of control.

Wet Wet Wet laid siege to the top of the UK charts thanks to Curtis’ popular blend of sentimentality and earthy humour, followed up five years later by the fairy-tale amour of Notting Hill, starring Julia Roberts.

In Christmas 2003, we swooned to the multi-faceted Love Actually, which Curtis also directed, his third collaboration with lucky talisman Grant.

Now, the writer-director takes the helm for this nostalgic tale of friendship between the members of a pirate radio station, broadcasting from the North Sea in the mid-’60s.

His favourite leading man is nowhere to be seen, nor for that matter, are the big laughs and gooey outpourings of longing.

The year is 1966, a golden era for rock ‘n’ roll in this country, but BBC radio plays a mere 45 minutes of pop music a day.

Thus, around 25 million listeners tune into pirate radio stations, which devote every waking (and sleeping) minute to music.

One such station is Radio Rock, under the captainship of Quentin (Bill Nighy).

The DJs are a motley crew of misfits with one thing in common: a passion for vinyl.

They include star deejay Gavin (Rhys Ifans), American rival The Count (Philip Seymour Hoffman), sarcastic and cruel Dave (Nick Frost), love sick Simon (Chris O’Dowd), sex god Midnight Mark (Tom Wisdom), goofy Angus ‘The Nut’ Nutsford (Rhys Darby), newsreader On-The-Hour John (Will Adamsdale) and the aptly named Thick Kevin (Tom Brooke).

Quentin’s godson Carl (Tom Sturridge), who has recently been expelled from school, joins Radio Rock for the summer, in the hope that he might mend his ways.

Instead, the youngster embarks on a quest to track down his biological father, who could be one of the crew members.

Meanwhile, back in London, government minister Dormandy (Kenneth Branagh) explores every legal loophole to shut down the pirate radio stations, with the help of his protege (Jack Davenport).

The Boat That Rocked certainly rocks and rolls to a thumping soundtrack which includes The Beach Boys, Jeff Beck, Cream, Jimi Hendrix, The Rolling Stones and The Who.

However, the script springs a leak early on as Curtis attempts to juggle too many thinly sketched characters and gradually loses ballast under the weight of its own unfulfilled ambition.

As usual, Nighy pilfers most of the chuckles as a dapper man of loose morals who views Carl’s expulsion for smoking cigarettes and drugs as ‘spectacular!’ The running joke about the name of Dormandy’s underling grows weary very quickly, made worse by Branagh’s theatrics as the pantomime villain.

Subtlety tumbles overboard as the battle between government and Radio Rock intensifies, culminating in a bizarre action-oriented finale reminiscent of Titanic, albeit on a budget.