Jersey Boys (2014)

JERSEY BOYS  (2014)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Clint Eastwood
    John Lloyd Young, Vincent Piazza, Erich Bergen,
    Christopher Walken, Renée Marino, Michael Lomenda,
    Joseph Russo, Lacey Hannan, Barry Livingston
If you were an American teenager in the 1960s, the Four Seasons were almost certainly a part of your high school soundtrack. Clint Eastwood's screen version of the hit Broadway show traces the group's history from the streets of Newark in the late 1950s to their 1990 induction into the Rock-&-Roll Hall of Fame. It's kind of a mopey biopic - the guys don't look like they're having fun, even when they're having fun - but there are some inspired bits, like the part where Bob Gaudio (Erich Bergen) hears some car horns out the window of a city bus, and you realize, at the exact moment he does, that the horns have just played the first three notes of "Sherry", which he will proceed to write, more or less on the spot. (Robert Alda as George Gershwin had a similar epiphany in 1945 in "Rhapsody In Blue".) The highlight has got to be the finale - a curtain call that starts with the boys singing some a cappella doo-wop under a streetlight and builds into a rousing production number in which everybody in the cast takes part. Too bad the rest of the movie couldn't have that much life.