Pirate Radio is like a confirmation of those highly embellished stories parents tell about how cool things were when they were growing up. In other words, it’s a fairly lame movie. The English writer-director Richard Curtis has taken more liberties with history than the film (or its ads) indicates, but if you were to remove the balderdash about how the Brits banned rock and roll on the radio at the height of the ’60s, this shipload of nostalgia would keel over. Instead, it’s crewed by a fairly decent bunch of British comics, under the command of Philip Seymour Hoffman as the token American loafer. Because these A.M. buccaneers are—supposedly—the sole purveyors of pop on the airwaves, a whopping half of Great Britain tunes in to their broadcasts from a ship on the North Sea, where our heroes are free from bureaucrats’ attempts to impugn them for reasons that seem purely prudish. The movie adopts the bromides of the time, save for the old aphorism that you can’t trust anyone over 30; now that anyone who said that in 1966 is probably twice that age (or older), the movie has been envisioned as a Peter Pan fantasy for the middle-aged, complete with a pirate ship and colorful striped pantaloons.

In essence, Pirate Radio is S.S. Animal House, with the super-senior frat boys replaced by superannuated swingers. They even have a buzz-killing dean: an old-blood bureaucrat embodied by Kenneth Branagh. But Curtis drowns out anything “bawdy,” “raucous” or “raunchy” with sickeningly good-natured bonhomie, and even tosses in a guileless teenage castaway—recently expelled from a repressive boys’ school—so that he can learn valuable life lessons from the sagging nonconformists. There are some funny bits, but Curtis hasn’t the knack for dirty humor; after every naughty nuance, he expects a little pat on the head. “Good boy! You made another lesbian joke! What a good wittle fwee spirit!” It’s sort of cute that everyone is so obscenely well-intentioned (aside from, of course, the Victorian-era-leftover villains), but you know that all this youthful innocence comes straight out of a baggie labeled “baby-boomer catnip.” When Hoffman delivers the inevitable “these are the best days of our lives” spiel, viewers born after 1955 will likely get seasick. However, the tale-telling parents in the audience can feel cool and daring while laughing at a moralist named Twatt (who’s too square to be in on the joke), and still be swept away by the those-were-the-days schmaltz. The movie is set in a vacuum (Vietnam is mentioned once, in passing), but its familiar soundtrack makes all this chummy reverie seem wistfully authentic.

Pirate Radio is waterlogged with cheese, but at least it isn’t a cheat like Taking Woodstock, which was like a tall glass of buttermilk. This movie benefits from its ensemble cast, and they help keep the picture afloat. Bill Nighy might come off as gay to American audiences—as so many British actors do—but his fey sticktoitiveness evokes the sort of bohemian spirit whose cultivation seems hip at any age; and Nick Frost—best known as Simon Pegg’s bumpkin foil—uses his corpulence as a come-on. It’s such an absurd trick that it just might work. When he’s caught sleeping with a buddy’s girl, he flashes an “I made a booboo” grin that suggests a puppy who’s peed on the floor. His Dave has become reconciled to the fact that his sexual magnetism is simply beyond his control; flabby Frost gives the most effortless parody of the sexual revolution that I’ve ever seen. On the other end of the spectrum, drawing on his stagey bravado, Branagh rolls his Rs resplendently. Every crisp consonant this stalwart utters pays homage to the Queen’s English. Branagh plays this martinet as the consummation of Basil Fawlty’s dreams—just as the shipboard stewards of life, liberty and the pursuit of fun are probably the consummation of Curtis’s dreams. Maybe after this hippie hangover, Curtis will wake up and remember that he’s still the man behind Bridget Jones’s Diary, Love Actually, and Four Weddings and a Funeral. Rock on!