A curious true story, four dynamic female Australian singer/actors and the endlessly charming Chris O’Dowd (“Girls”) make “The Sapphires” stand above the fray of many ’60s period pieces, which too often fall into a pattern of rolling out groovy, recognizable iconography.
That does happen, a bit, but for the most part Aussie director Wayne Blair’s feature debut is snappy and fresh. In a dusty Outback town in 1968, three Aboriginal teenage sisters (Deborah Mailman, Jessica Mauboy and Miranda Tapsell), each more outspoken than the last, are trying to make a go of it as a singing group. They nail a Merle Haggard tune at a local contest, but receive only icy stares from the racist locals.
Pub piano player Dave (O’Dowd), a scrappy Irishman with an omnipresent flask, takes a shine to them and agrees to be their manager — provided they’ll ditch the whiny country and western and switch to his preferred genre, soul.
Soon, they’re learning synchronized moves, enlisting their estranged cousin (Shari Sebbens) as a fourth and donning sparkly matching minidresses to audition for the US military, which needs musical entertainment to boost flagging soldier morale in Vietnam.
The upstart Sapphires are a smash to watch as they cover soul tunes like “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” “What a Man” and “I Can’t Help Myself.”
Offstage, tempers flare in the Southeast Asian heat, especially between protective oldest sis Gail (Mailman) and cousin Kay, a light-skinned Aboriginal girl who was taken from the family as a youngster, by the state, and raised as white. Their indigenous civil rights struggles are echoed in American television coverage of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination.
But the heaviness of racism and war is a mere backdrop to the film’s lively core, and “The Sapphires” is at its best during musical numbers and the flirtations of the various girls — particularly Mailman, whose vociferous arguments with O’Dowd have an irrepressible chemistry.
“The Sapphires” is based on a 2004 play written by the son of one of the actual women in the group, and seems like it in the shaggy structure, where there’s sometimes a bit of a disconnect between weighty issues and sibling squabbling.
But it’s so much fun you won’t mind much, and most viewers will be completely new to this eye-opening story of how some feisty Aussies made their musical mark in Vietnam.