Initially called The Boat That Rocked for it’s British release, Pirate Radio is, in a nutshell, a coming-of-age dramady that is reminiscent of Almost Famous and Adventureland. It centers around a boy named Carl (played by Tom Sturridge, an insufferably awkward combination of Zombie-Adventureland’s Jesse Eisenberg and Harry Potter) who finds his manhood and the father he never met on board a boat that broadcasts the pop music of it’s day to a repressed country called England, where, we learn, the music of groups like the Kinks, the Who and the Rolling Stones used to be outlawed from the nation’s official stations. Fortunately, there are no broadcasting restrictions out in international waters, and the protagonists of the film take full advantage of this, airing everything from announcing the loss of a crew-member’s virginity to the dreaded “F” word, which makes them a target for the stiffs of the British government, who make several impotent attempts at thwarting the Station’s antics. There are also a bunch of unnecessary sub-plots and sidetracks to the story, cut between montages of random British people dancing badly or swooning over their favorite rebel DJ.

The movie has it’s moments, for sure, but too much of the film is wasted on uncomfortable scenes and dialogue that never pays off, and few of the ensemble characters are interesting or likable at all. The women are especially badly written, to the point where you’d almost think that writer/director Richard Curtis has never talked to one before. I would call it a sexist film if the men weren’t as equally flaky and fickle. The only reason we are to believe that the Pirate Radio crew are the “good guys” is because of the stark contrast of the uptight, joyless members of the prime minister’s cabinet who want nothing but to put an end to people dancing in their bedrooms and lunch breaks. The ship sinks at the end of the film, but we are meant to believe that the Pirate Radioers were ultimately triumphant because nowadays, rock and pop music is played all day, every day, on the corporately owned and funded radio stations all over the world, so we can all go home self-assured and satisfied that the freedom and beauty won out, in the end. This is in a way a summation of the failure of the sixties — that it never looked beyond the bright lights and stimuli that initially seduced those people into rebellion, and ultimately was too easy to appropriate back under the dark wings of the established order. Like watching Tipper Gore dance to the music of Fleetwood Mac, there are few things less Rock ‘n’ Roll than this.