Entertainment

SOUNDS LIKE A GOOD FILM, BUT ONLY IN THEORY

RON Livingston is an in gratiating screen pres ence who has appeared in relatively few movies since “Office Space,” so I was disappointed his new vehicle, “Music Within,” is off-key on so many levels.

It must have sounded great on paper: Livingston plays Richard Pimentel, a real-life deaf Vietnam War veteran turned motivational speaker who lobbies to create the American With Disabilities Act.

The biggest problem is that debuting director Steven Sawalich, working from a screenplay attributed to three writers, makes the story play more like a fictional quirkfest.

Pimentel’s mother (Rebecca De Mornay) is so depressed and suicidal after a series of earlier stillbirths that she ships newborn Richard to an orphanage for a couple of years; his Chinese-

American father is killed when a case of soy sauce lands on his head.

Though he’s too old by a decade or two, Livingston shows up as teenage Pimentel in 1969, where he’s told by a college official (Hector Elizondo) to get some life experience when he applies for a scholarship. This Pimentel does by going to Vietnam, where he loses his hearing in a bomb blast.

Stateside, Pimentel finally goes to college, where his new facility with lip-

reading makes him the only student able to understand wheelchair-bound Art Honeyman, who suffers from severe cerebral palsy (and is played as a personality-free collection of tics by a bearded Michael Sheen, unrecognizable as the same actor who portrayed Tony Blair in “The Queen”).

Seeing the indignities heaped on himself, Honeyman and an alcoholic vet buddy (Yul Vazquez), Pimentel uses his skills as a speaker to crusade for new laws to prohibit discrimination against the disabled, who the film reminds us were wide open to ridicule and even arrest.

“Music Within,” which takes its title from a quote by Oliver Wendell Holmes, never establishes a consistent tone, going from achingly sincere to borderline farcical, often in the same scene. (Leslie Nielsen turns up as an audiologist.)

A lame romantic subplot with Melissa George keeps interrupting the film’s momentum, and worse, the filmmakers succumb to the temptation to limn the soundtrack with the usual clichéd selection of ’60s and ’70s songs. I love “Joy to the World” as much as anybody, but it’s time for a moratorium.

Running time: 93 minutes. Rated PG-13 (sexual references, drugs). At the Empire and the Loews Village.