There's a telling moment in James Mangold's brilliant Walk the Line when Johnny Cash's father sneers that his recently arrested son "won't have to work so hard to make people think you've been to jail". Like so many rock stars, Cash played the outlaw like he played prisons – more as a visitor than an inmate. The opposite was true of the Four Seasons, whose saleably clean-cut preppy image was somewhat at odds with their variously delinquent pasts. While Frankie Valli (ne Castelluccio) may have been a good kid with the voice of an angel, his bandmates' dirty faces were familiar to the wardens of the local lock-ups. Together they enjoyed the patronage of New Jersey mobster Angelo "Gyp" DeCarlo, whose ear for a sweet melody was as sharp as his killer reputation, and for whom the Four Seasons performed in prison after he was handed a 12-year sentence in 1970.
The enticing Sinatra-style discord between low-life roots and high-flying harmonies is at the heart of Clint Eastwood's new film, adapted from the multiple Tony award-winning stage musical. As we are told from the outset, there were only three ways out of the neighbourhood in which our antiheroes grew up: join the army, get "mobbed up" or get famous. "For us," says Boardwalk Empire's Vincent Piazza as founding band member Tommy DeVito, "it was two out of three."
Significantly, it's the streetwise DeVito who first kicks these scrappy Jersey boys out from under a streetlight and into the spotlight, only for his ongoing hustler shtick to threaten to drag them all straight back again in what co-writer Marshall Brickman calls "a classic American story – rags to riches, then back to rags". "Why isn't Tommy here talking to me?" asks Christopher Walken's Gyp (all high trousers and hair and oddly elevated vowels) when DeVito's debts come back to haunt the band and it falls to Valli to bail him out. "Because," replies Valli, "he don't sing My Mother's Eyes like I do."
(Apparently, Brickman and co-writer Rick Elice were contacted by "associates" of the departed DeCarlo to ensure he would be portrayed "respectfully", which he is; in these circles, being played by Walken is surely the equivalent of being knighted.)
A core conceit of both the stage show and the movie is that each band member has his own Rashomon-like version of the truth, a theme represented with variable success on-screen by characters directly addressing the audience in the casual manner of Woody Allen in Annie Hall (which Brickman co-wrote). It's a cute device (a bassist's gloss during an instrumental break strikes the right note) but it never matches the more subtle intertextualities of Kevin Spacey's underrated Beyond the Sea, in which the director and star took smart swipes at fact versus fiction in the Bobby Darin story as John Goodman's character demanded to know how the hell someone could "be too old to play himself?!"
There's nothing so structurally audacious in Jersey Boys, which remains an essentially stagey affair – a broad-strokes narrative built around a jukebox compendium of hits that swaps the Greek farce holiday snaps of Abba's Mamma Mia! for the West Side Story inflections of the Four Seasons' family albums. Significantly, several of the stage show cast are back, including Tony winner John Lloyd Young in the lead and Erich Bergen and Michael Lomenda respectively reprising their roles as Short Shorts songwriter Bob Gaudio (who shares executive producer credits with Valli) and goofy bassist Nick Massi. Whatever its big-screen ambitions, this production remains wedded to its theatrical roots.
Of course, what really sold the stage show were the songs; performed live, the Four Seasons' repertoire provoked foot-stomping approval and dancing in the aisles from the middle- (and up) aged punters. On screen, they feel a tad flat – not something you could ever say about the records (look at the electrifying use Philip Kaufman made of them in The Wanderers).
Having deftly directed a biopic of Charlie Parker in Bird, Eastwood seems altogether less certain how to handle a musical per se. Maybe he simply has a better ear for jazz than for bubblegum doo-wop, but his attention is clearly more atuned to the boys' backstreet back-story than to their famous vocal front line. Several songs are performed as TV broadcasts, with Eastwood focusing upon the artifice of performance rather than swinging to the beat of the songs (compare any of these with the musical set-pieces of Tom Hanks's That Thing You Do!, which undercuts the music business while still bristling with affection for the tunes).
Moreover, this version of the Four Seasons story appears to take place in a vacuum; for all the period detail (good to see a solid '56 Dodge Coronet in the street scenes alongside the more camera-friendly car cliches), there's scant sense of the pop world outside the boys' own four-part bubble.
The result is a somewhat plodding but still sporadically entertaining affair, buoyed up by Goodfellas-inflected jokes about a young Joe Pesci ("yes that Joe Pesci") and underpinned by an indestructibly infectious songbook to which only the director himself appears able to turn a deaf ear.
