Pirate Radiois a highly fictionalized story of an imaginary seagoing station with theunimaginative name of Rock Radio. Philip Seymour Hoffman heads the ensemble cast as the lone Yank among thepirate ship’s limey oddballs, playing a pumped-up DJ spouting a hyper line ofAM radio jive while spinning singles on the turntable. Kenneth Branagh is theboo-hiss villain, a Blue Meanie cabinet minister determined to silence RockRadio by any means possible.
Grafted onto this uneven comedy of culturalrebellion is the story of Carl (Tom Sturridge), the virginal shipboard newbieinitiated into the joy of sex and the camaraderie of rock ’n’ roll with theeccentrics and misfits who keep the music coming. Cut-aways to avid listenersgathered around radios in the United Kingdom show the influence of pirate radioon the body public.
Alas, director Richard Curtis should have hired ahistory consultant to ensure a few simple facts. Pirate Radio is set in 1966, yet half the music ostensibly playedby this station wasn’t recorded for another year or two. Apparently, the DJswere so hip, they could hear the future. The script is also occasionallyanachronistic. Was anybody concerned with “thinking outside the box” in 1966acliché that didn’t enter the language until decades later? And in those days,“cool” as a one-word exclamation was uttered only on chilly days. But, overall,the story captures some of the crackling outlaw excitement of piratebroadcasting as well as its impact. By 1967 the BBC decided to join the fray byestablishing its own channel for the new musicin a noncommercial setting that probablyprovides a better analogy to the college radio of latter days than thepayola-driven pirates.
The bawdy humor among the shipmates provides Pirate Radio with its funniest moments.However, Branagh’s crusade against rock itself is more like Monty Python on anoff-episode than anything else.
