Focus Features 
 
 There are moments in Richard Curtis' rambling ensemble comedy "Pirate Radio" that are so exuberant they're almost enough to carry you past the movie's considerable rough spots. The picture -- whose setup, at least, is based on fact -- takes place in 1966, on a refurbished tanker anchored in the North Sea, off the coast of England, that serves as a floating radio station. At the time -- smack in the middle of the glory days of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Who and the Kinks -- the BBC was broadcasting barely two hours of rock 'n' roll each week. Enterprising DJs responded by setting up shop on vessels stationed just outside of U.K. territorial waters, broadcasting whatever music they fancied around the clock, to the delight of English kids and to the government's dismay. 
 
 Curtis -- the writer of "Four Weddings and a Funeral" and "Notting Hill," and the writer-director of "Love Actually" -- uses this short-lived era (by 1968, the BBC had changed its programming policy, although pirate radio stations continued to thrive in various forms) as the backdrop for an intensely fictionalized story about a bunch of DJs who happily, and sometimes not-so-happily, live together on a big boat, working out various professional and romantic rivalries and, in between, playing a little music. Bill Nighy is Quentin, the randy, erudite and obviously wealthy benefactor of the radio operation stationed on his ship. His teenage godson, Carl (Tom Sturridge), has been packed off by his mother to spend some time on the boat, where he's at first teased, hazed or, worst of all, ignored by the DJs who live and work there. They include the Count (Philip Seymour Hoffman, in a relaxed, enjoyable performance), an American who's found his niche among the Britons but who feels threatened by the station's star DJ Gavin (Rhys Ifans), a sex god who swans about bedecked in feathers and Brian Jones-style velvet jackets. The rest of the crew consists of other DJs too numerous to list, and their personalities are barely defined enough to survive the movie's duration: There's pudgy ladies' man Dave (Nick Frost), the innocently asexual Simon (Chris O'Dowd), and stalwart news reporter News John (Will Adamsdale). Meanwhile, stiff bureaucrat Sir Alistair Dormandy (played, amusingly enough, by Kenneth Branaugh) does his damnedest to try to close the whole operation down. 
 
 Writer-director Curtis' convoluted, overpacked story suffers from a malady I like to call Love Actually-itis: He starts by introducing characters and conflicts only to drop them. Then, usually after you've stopped caring, he resurrects and resolves those conflicts, but only halfheartedly, before moving on all too cheerfully to something else. Despite Curtis' bumbling, "Pirate Radio" manages to stay afloat bravely enough -- at least until the climax, which comes off as a confused marriage between "Top of the Pops" and "Titanic." 
 
 Fortunately, Curtis isn't completely tone-deaf, and he does manage to capture the mood, and certainly the sound, of the era. The best parts of "Pirate Radio" take place in the movie's margins, in the vignettes and asides that don't necessarily have much to do with the plot. In one sequence, a boatload of giggling, waving, miniskirted girls come to the station for some Saturday fun: The DJs watch their approach with the nervous, horny anxiety of cartoon bridegrooms. The picture is dotted with sequences that show, briefly and succinctly, what rock 'n' roll radio meant to young English kids at the time: Curtis shows youngsters tuning in at bedtime before hiding their glowing transistors under their pillows, or a group of young nurses huddled around a radio during their break time. The music -- which includes some of the usual suspects previously mentioned, as well as killers like Dusty Springfield's "You Don't Have to Say You Love Me" and frothy diversions like the Turtles' "You Know She'd Rather Be with Me" -- is used intelligently and deftly. And Curtis knows he has a valuable secret weapon in Bill Nighy, who looks super in his wardrobe of trim striped stovepipe trousers and modder-than-mod double-breasted jackets. Late in the movie, we get to see him dancing to "My Generation." The guy does a mean mashed-potato, and it takes no imagination whatsoever to see what he must have looked like on the dance floor circa 1966. If you're looking for proof of the youth-preserving properties of rock 'n' roll, Nighy is your man. ||||| Pirate Radio (2009) 
 
 Boys will be boys and often at top volume in “Pirate Radio,” Richard Curtis ’s fanciful fiction about rebel broadcasters who, in the mid-1960s, blasted British airwaves and eardrums with the Stones, the Kinks and the Who, among other youth-quaking greats of the era. Stuffed with playful character actors and carpeted with wall-to-wall tunes, the film makes for easy viewing and easier listening, even if Mr. Curtis, who wrote and directed, has nothing really to say about these rebels for whom rock ’n’ roll was both life’s rhyme and its reason. 
 
 Borrowed from the annals of the strange but true, the story opens in 1966, before the British invasion had breached Britain’s official radio channels, run by the British Broadcasting Corporation. In his book “Selling the Sixties: The Pirates and Pop Music Radio,” Robert Chapman writes that the government’s cultural guardians responded to rock ’n’ roll with degrees of indifference and hostility: “BBC policy makers continued to go about their cultural missionary work much as they always had done, selectively retrieving a folk tradition here, acting as a kindly public service benefactor there, bestowing sponsorship upon those deemed worthy of official approval.” Although the BBC played a few weekly hours of rock, it largely, aided by the government, kept the noise down. 
 
 To fill that musical gap (and to serve real commercial interests), pirate radio stations dropped anchor off the British coast and began beaming rock ’n’ roll to a grateful nation (some 20 million listeners). In “Pirate Radio,” the tuneful epicenter qua bad-boys club is a tanker on which some dozen men, D.J.’s and various supporting players, including a token woman (and lesbian), taunt the government scolds with Jimi Hendrix and Dusty Springfield. Rising to the rebels’ bait with increasing apoplectic rage is Sir Alistair Dormandy (Kenneth Branagh, wearing a mustache and cartoon sneer), a government minister who tries to shut the pirates down so he can keep the nation safe with regulated doses of high culture and educational programming. 
 
 Mr. Curtis alludes to the subtleties of this simmering culture war a few times by flanking Sir Alistair with art, including an abstract blob that looks like a Henry Moore sculpture. Sir Alistair’s snobbery and paternalism make him the enemy, and his position makes him a potentially interesting one. But Mr. Curtis isn’t concerned with exploring why gatekeepers might want to maintain the divide between high and popular culture. He wants to party. So he piles on the comic high jinks, lobs the jokes and cranks the splendid tunes, which is fine even if he tends to cue many of these for the hard of thinking: playing Leonard Cohen’s “So Long Marianne,” for instance, to accompany a heartbreaker named Marianne (Talulah Riley). 
 
 Marianne plays a mean trick on the ship’s innocent in residence, Carl (Tom Sturridge), who’s under the wing of the renegades’ leader, Quentin (Bill Nighy, reliably amusing). A tasty treat played by January Jones, on hiatus from driving Don Draper up a wall in “Mad Men,” plays an even meaner trick on another of the ship’s D.J.’s. Both female characters are irrelevant, which sums up the film’s interest in women, at least when vertical. The truer romance involves rival D.J.’s played by Philip Seymour Hoffman and Rhys Ifans, both fine, who take turns stealing scenes as Mr. Curtis gamely invokes the spirit of Richard Lester (“A Hard Day’s Night”) and, every so often, throws in another meaningless aerial shot of the ship. 
 
 “Pirate Radio” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Sex, drugs and, well, you know. 
 
 PIRATE RADIO 
 
 Opens on Friday nationwide. 
 
 Written and directed by Richard Curtis; director of photography, Danny Cohen; edited by Emma E. Hickox; production designer, Mark Tildesley; produced by Tim Bevan, Eric Fellner and Hilary Bevan Jones; released by Focus Features. Running time: 1 hour 55 minutes. 
 
 WITH: Philip Seymour Hoffman (the Count), Bill Nighy (Quentin), Rhys Ifans (Gavin), Nick Frost (Dave), Kenneth Branagh (Sir Alistair Dormandy), Tom Sturridge (Carl), Rhys Darby (Angus), Talulah Riley (Marianne), January Jones (Elenore) , Katherine Parkinson (Felicity) and Emma Thompson (Charlotte). ||||| Rock & roll history is being retraced in this appealingly ramshackle comedy from Love Actually writer-director Richard Curtis. Set in England circa 1966, the movie revels in the chaos that ensued when prudes at the BBC decided rock music was an evil that needed censorship and maybe banning. That’s when a renegade band of merry-prankster DJs, collectively known as Radio Rock, took to the sea in an old tanker and started broadcasting the devil’s music 24/7. The BBC, in the tight-assed person of Kenneth Branagh’s government minister, declares war. 
 
 Get more news and reviews from Peter Travers on the Travers Take 
 
 Leader of the pirates is Quentin (the sublime Bill Nighy), a man not adverse to drugs and hookers if they keep his DJs spinning. The boat is overloaded with eccentrics, including one American (Philip Seymour Hoffman having a rowdy good time of it) who calls himself the Count and works up a hot feud with DJ Gavin (a terrific Rhys Ifans). 
 
 The boat nearly sinks from character overload, and Curtis brakes when you most want him to gun it. But there’s no denying the comic energy of the cast. Couple that with blasts of Brit rock from the Beatles and the Stones to Dusty Springfield and David Bowie, and the ship is unsinkable. ||||| Do you like montages, but grow bored with the tedious plot bits in between? Then Pirate Radio is the movie for you. Set in 1966, during what an opening title helpfully labels “the greatest era for British rock ’n’ roll,” the movie takes place almost entirely on a massive, red-hulled ship that has been converted into a radio station for the purpose of promulgating the devil’s music to Britain’s unsuspecting populace, who would otherwise be limited to the rock-free BBC. Kenneth Branagh, copping Basil Fawlty’s mannerisms so blatantly that he should be paying John Cleese royalties, plays the government minister obsessed with shutting the pirates down, and Bill Nighy plays the station’s owner, a droll toff fond of scarves and wasp-waisted suits. 
 
 Curtis stocks the boat with a crew of fine comic actors, mostly playing the DJs of Radio Rock: Rhys Darby, Nick Frost, and Philip Seymour Hoffman, essentially doing a more animated take on Almost Famous’ Lester Bangs. But while they successfully convey a sense of shipboard camaraderie, enhanced by the boat’s no-girls-allowed rule, Curtis seems to have no idea how to take advantage of their talents. Darby plays an awkward semi-square à la Flight Of The Conchords, and Chris O’Dowd essentially Xeroxes his character from The IT Crowd. The driving force behind a wave of blandly successful British comedies that include Love Actually and the Bridget Jones films, Curtis evidently has the pull to purchase a dream cast, but not the ingenuity to take advantage of it. 
 
 Pirate Radio tries to create an atmosphere of boudoir farce mingled with love-generation libertinage, but while the men seem like randy wolves, the women are merely rancid, disloyal, disingenuous creatures whose actions seem untroubled by any kind of higher thought. Mad Men’s January Jones gets the worst role, as a guileless tart who marries O’Dowd’s loveless schnook solely to get close to Rhys Ifans’ swaggering popinjay. It’s bad enough that Curtis has made one more vanilla boomer comedy mindlessly touting the freedoms of the ’60s, but he can’t even keep his facts straight. A good many of the songs he relies on to push his torpid narrative forward were released well after the film’s events took place, and where he departs from the real events that inspired his story, he invariably does so in the service of making them less interesting. For a movie that ostensibly promotes individuality, Pirate Radio manifests precious little.
– Critics agree that the soundtrack of Pirate Radio can't be beat, and the top-notch cast is a joy. So when it comes to the shaky plot and pacing, some can turn a blind eye: "There’s no denying the comic energy of the cast," Peter Travers writes in Rolling Stone. "Couple that with blasts of Brit rock from the Beatles and the Stones to Dusty Springfield and David Bowie, and the ship is unsinkable." Writer/director Richard Curtis introduces "characters and conflicts only to drop them," Stephanie Zacharek of Salon complains. But no matter: The best bits "take place in the movie's margins, in the vignettes and asides that don't necessarily have much to do with the plot." Bah. A great cast and great tunes—some of which are not at all historically accurate—do not a great film make, Sam Adams writes for the AV Club. "Do you like montages, but grow bored with the tedious plot bits in between? Then Pirate Radio is the movie for you." Curtis alludes to the cultural issues behind the plot—a little, writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. Really, "he wants to party." Which he does, and "which is fine."