Jersey BoysDirected by Clint EastwoodReviewed by Sarah Hudson  In his largely positive review of the original Broadway production, New York Times theatre critic Ben Brantley described Jersey Boys’ audience as “… a mostly middle-aged crowd who seem to have forgotten what year it is, how old they are, and most importantly, that John Lloyd Young is not Frankie Valli.” While I enjoy making fun of baby boomers as much as the next millennial, when I saw the show not long after it premiered in 2005, I had the same reaction. I remember thinking at the time that Jersey Boys was about as much fun as I could remember having at the theatre.Jersey Boys is the story of the rise and fall and rise of sixties pop group Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons. The story, told Rashomon-style, is alternately narrated by Tommy DeVito, lackey for the neighborhood mobster and Frankie’s childhood friend; Nick Massi, the self-described Ringo of the group, who, like Tommy, is in and out of prison; and Bob Gaudio, the singer-songwriter who wrote the group’s most memorable hits.Because I enjoyed the show so much, I approached the film adaption, directed by Clint Eastwood and opening nationwide this weekend, with trepidation bordering on hostility. On stage, Jersey Boys was a profoundly theatrical experience, with much of its razzle dazzle dependent on tight choreography, quick costume changes and lush orchestrations that would seem either unimpressive or out of place on film. To say that nothing gets lost in translation from stage to screen would be wrong; Jersey Boys succeeds most when it feels least like a movie.The film retains the basic structure of the stage play. The film begins in 1951, where local mob boss Gyp DeCarlo (Christopher Walken, having a grand time), believes sixteen-year-old Frankie Castelluccio (John Lloyd Young, in the role he created in the original production) is a born star and pushes him under the wing of his flunkies, Nick (Michael Lomenda, who played the role in the first touring production) and, especially, Tommy (Boardwalk Empire’s Vincent Piazza). Before you know it, Frankie is fronting one of Tommy and Nicky’s many do-wop groups. But it isn’t until they meet up with singer-songwriter Bob Gaudio (Erich Bergen, another holdover from the original Broadway cast) and rechristen themselves Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons that things really take off and then (because this is a biopic) come crashing back down.The decision to keep John Lloyd Young as Valli, in lieu of casting a bigger name, might be the best decision the filmmakers made. While he is not a particularly revelatory dramatic actor, he is clearly comfortable with the character, knowing the exact beats to hit, and never acting to the cheap seats, as some making the stage-to-screen transition are wont to do. It’s less about Lloyd Young getting every element right than the fact that someone else likely would’ve gotten it all wrong. And this is of course to say nothing of his voice. Stories of this sort can suffer from what is known as the Poochie Principle, which holds that the number of times the script tells the audience, “the kid’s got it!” is inversely proportional to how much talent said kid has actually got. If anything, the script might sell Lloyd Young’s stunning falsetto short.The second thing the film does right is that it never lets the audience forget Jersey Boys’ origins as a stage musical. Recent Broadway adaptations have struggled with exactly how to make the inherently surreal nature of a musical palatable to a film audience (the atrocious 2005 film version of Rent springs to mind). Eastwood and his production designer James Murakami, instead of trying to make the act of bursting into song realistic, revel in the artifice. Sets look like sets; the streets of 1952 Newark look so clean you could eat off of them. In embracing the limitations of the form, the film is set free.This is not to say that the movie is perfect, or even as good as it could be. The fractured, multi-narrator storytelling and the film’s intentionally stylized aesthetic could lend themselves to a truly interesting meditation on the nature of truth and artifice in art. But, disappointingly the film, particularly the script from Marshall Brickman and Rick Ellice, isn’t interested in going much deeper than any other movie biopic and while avoiding many stage-to-screen pitfalls, the script falls prey to a significant number of biopic clichés: Humble origins! Drugs! Sex! Failure! Redemption! I dare you not to roll your eyes when, while watching TV, Frankie comments that an actress is about to cry and their screamingly effeminate producer (played by Mike Doyle, beloved to Law and Order: SVU fans) rolls his eyes and retorts, “Frankie, big girls don’t cry.” (At least it’s a touch subtler than in Walk the Line, where Reese Witherspoon hysterically wails, “It burns! It burns!”) These elements weren’t significantly different on the stage; the difference is in the pacing. Where the stage version didn’t let the audience dwell much on these hackneyed moments before distracting with another tightly choreographed dance number, the movie draws them out, making their ridiculousness all the more apparent.I went into Jersey Boys feeling fairly certain there was no reason for the film to exist. Seeing it did not disabuse me of that notion. If you have seen Ray, or Walk the Line, or even Eastwood’s own Bird, you have seen this movie. That being said, like the play before it, it was the most fun I have had at the movies this summer. To quote another soon-to-be-adapted musical, nice is different than good. Jersey Boys isn’t especially good but it’s very nice.