Pirate Radio is arrrrrrrrrrrguably one of the best comedies of the year. Sorry. I just couldn’t resist – particularly since the film left me in such an upbeat mood that I’m still singing and dancing and spewing pirate puns all over the office.

Even viewers whose parents weren’t yet born when the action takes place will enjoy this buoyant romp through history. Richard Curtis, the same writer/director responsible for Love, Actually, has come up with a film that chronicles a time in the early 60’s when British radio stations were only allowed to broadcast two hours of rock-n-roll per week--just when the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, and other greats were coming of age, along with the rest of the world. In response to the insatiable urge for the new music, clever entrepreneurs would deck out boats with powerful radio equipment, and they would broadcast 24-7, from locations several miles off shore. Pirate Radio is the story of one such ship, where a collection of disparate DJ’s live in questionable harmony while basically selling their souls for rock-n-roll and sailing past rigid government attempts to find them and shut them down.

Phillip Seymour Hoffman plays the veteran DJ and token American onboard. Bill Nighy is the dandy ship owner, Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson make fun appearances, and the rest of the cast is made up of popular British character actors, including Tom Surridge, Rhys Ifans and Nick Frost. It’s worth the price of admission alone just to see Mad Men’s January Jones playing a swell Eleanor. But the music is the true star of the film. It has a rocking sound track of all your favorite oldies, expertly arranged to capture the spirit of each particular scene. I dare you not to sing along--you’ll be thrilled to realize how many of the lyrics you remember. In this film epoch when originality and brightness are extremely hard to come by, Pirate Radio will shiver your timbers from stern to aft.

Rated R

--Lisa Johnson Mandell