It seems to be true that the BBC only broadcast 30 minutes a day of pop music throughout most of the '60s, and that to fill the gap, Radio Caroline operated several illegal floating radio stations to fill the gap, but that's likely the extent of factuality in director Richard Curtis's Pirate Radio, originally titled The Boat That Rocked. The film's finale, which I'll try not to reveal, is also based on an actual incident.

In place of plot, director Richard Curtis seems to be aiming for a non-story populated by a continuous stream of eccentric characters (shown here).

Curtis is known to American audiences for directing 1993's Love Actually, but perhaps more importantly as the writer of such films as Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill and Bridget Jones's Diary. Pirate Radio, which shares a lot thematically with this year's Taking Woodstock, is more thinly written than most of his previous work. In place of plot, he seems to be aiming for a non-story populated by a continuous stream of eccentric characters, much in the style of the late Robert Altman. To be sure, there's something of a M.A.S.H. feel of a loosely allied team of rebels in Pirate Radio, including Rhys Ifans (The Informers), Nick Frost (Hot Fuzz) and scene-stealer Phillip Seymour Hoffman (Doubt), all under the loose authority of the hilarious Bill Nighy (Underworld: Rise of the Lycans), with Kenneth Brannagh (Valkyrie) as an uptight British politician determined to sink the illegal broadcasters, literally, as it turns out.

It's a picture whose cast I like as much as I like its subversive theme, but the constant flitting from character to character, when few of them ever actually do or say much of anything, leaves me wondering what the picture is really about. Even as it tries to mimic the serendipitous feel of Altman, it strives for but misses Altman's zaniness, which somehow suggests that there really is a cosmic plan somewhere under the seeming randomness. In Pirate Radio, there really is no plan, other than the painfully laborious process of depriving Nighy's wimpy godson of his virginity, a vacuum which scuttles Curtis' mission.

Like Taking Woodstock, it should be about the music, but there's actually precious little of it heard, mainly limited to several gratuitous montages depicting the same landlubber listeners doing the same things over and over again. Other than a sequence of rival DJs Hoffman and Ifans daring each other to climb to the top of the shipboard radio tower — with shots that look an awful lot like the actors really did (but probably didn't) — I don't feel a pressing need to tune into Pirate Radio a second time.