The Boat That Rocked (2009)

Richard Curtis, a man who has made a handsome career out of mistaking geniality for insight, here turns his attention to the pirate radio ships of 1966. The resulting vessel is crewed by an ensemble of British character actors doing their practiced business, and it sails on a tide of jukebox standards toward a climax borrowed from a more famous maritime disaster. The picture was a commercial disappointment at home and was cut by twenty minutes for American audiences, which tells us something about the ruthlessness of distributors and rather less about the film itself.

The cultural inventory aboard is thin. The crew is white, male, and loudly heterosexual, and the women who drift through the frame are groupies, mothers, or prizes to be won and broadcast about. A single name in the supporting cast list gestures toward a same-sex attachment, and the film does nothing with it. The government men who oppose the station are censorious prudes, not capitalists, so the picture's rebellious streak amounts to a fondness for loud music and unmarried men. Nobody lectures us. Curtis has never been a preacher; he is a host, and hosts do not scold their guests.

We are left with a shaggy, amiable thing that wants to be loved and mostly succeeds at being tolerated. The jokes land softly, the soundtrack does the heavy lifting, and the politics extend no further than a raised eyebrow at the establishment. It is a period romp with a period romp's conscience, which is to say none worth measuring. Charming, weightless, and entirely of its moment, though not in the way its makers intended. The needle drops and the ship sinks, and we are no wiser about anything.