With its bittersweet picture of disparate despairing men who are getting on in years and getting owhere until they seize one last chance at doing something with their lives, Still Crazy inevitably evokes another, more recent success: The Full Monty. Still Crazy is altogether more plausible and more entertaining than The Full Monty, and a whole lot funnier. The surprise is that its take on the band members is ultimately so affectionate.
The sprightly screenplay is by Dick Clement and Ian la Fresnais, past masters at exploring male-male relationships in the television series, The Likely Lads, Porridge and Auf Wiedersehen, Pet. They also shared the screenplay credit with Roddy Doyle on Alan Parker's film of The Commitments, which so exuberantly followed the uphill progress of a younger, but no less volatile band line-up.
Still Crazy is set 21 years after the break-up of the once-popular group, Strange Fruit, whose old hits included Tequila Mocking-bird. With the prospect of cashing in on the 1970s revival through a European tour and a gig at the Wisbech festival, they reluctantly reform. However, just as their music is rooted in the past, their relationships to each other remains based in all their former antagonisms - which soon resurface, along with some new ones. The consequences are strewn with witty one-liners - example: "You worshipped the ground he vomited on" - and put together with a keen eye for detail. The producers hired Chris Difford of Squeeze to write Strange Fruit's lyrics, with Jeff Lynne and Mick Jones (the Foreigner one, not the Clash singer-guitarist) providing music, and Clive Langer and Alan Winstanley to produce the recordings. And they got Gary Kemp, who turned from Spandau Ballet to acting, to advise the actors on what the press book euphemistically describes as "the manners and habits of rock stars".
The band members - who, in another pop tradition, have wonderfully nondescript names like Les Wickes and Ray Simms - are played with panache, and admirably straight faces, by Stephen Rea, Jimmy Nail, Timothy Spall, Bruce Robinson, and Bill Nighy, who is superb as the vain, glazed-eyed lead singer, a character so pitiful that one could as easily cry as laugh at his self-deluded behaviour. Helena Bergstrom is a delight as his demanding Swedish second wife, a perfect parody of the exotic Yoko-esque second wife and band-wrecker, and there's also Juliet Aubrey as the band's ever-patient former PA, Hans Matheson as the cute young guitarist they recruit, and a perfectly droll Billy Connolly as the band's roadie and the movie's narrator.
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