Clint Eastwood makes our day as the seemingly miscast director of “Jersey Boys,’’ adding dramatic heft to this hit-filled, perfectly cast big-screen adaptation of the long-running Broadway musical.
You couldn’t ask for a more meticulous depiction of the ’50s, when the musical group that would become the Four Seasons was first organized by Tommy DeVito (Vincent Piazza), a gofer for genial New Jersey crime boss Gyp DeCarlo (Christopher Walken).
Gyp is particularly enamored of the falsetto of 16-year-old Francesco Castelluccio (Tony winner John Lloyd Young), who’s also been dabbling, with hilarious ineptitude, in small-time crime.
So, renamed Frankie Valli, the teenager joins Tommy and fellow Rahway State Prison alumnus Nick Massi (Michael Lomenda) to pursue their show-business dreams before mostly unappreciative audiences.
The group struggles to find success or even an identity until a young Joe Pesci (yes, that Joe Pesci) suggests the guys recruit the clean-cut Bob Gaudio (Erich Bergen), a songwriting whiz who can quote T.S. Eliot.
Then they hookup with flamboyantly gay producer-lyricist Bob Crewe (Mike Doyle) at Manhattan’s legendary Brill Building — and after a trying apprenticeship as backup singers, take the name Four Seasons from a bowling alley.
The hits don’t start arriving until 1960, nearly 45 minutes into Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice’s smart adaptation of their Broadway book. Eastwood doesn’t do anything especially fancy with the staging of the numbers, which works just fine.
It’s hard to go wrong with such gems as “Sherry,’’ “Big Girls Don’t Cry’’ and “Walk Like a Man,’’ performed live before the cameras by Young, who sounds uncannily like Valli, and the rest of the group.
Piazza serves as the film’s dramatic engine, his Tommy increasingly jealous and resentful of the growing collaboration between Frankie and the show-business savvy Bob. As the group’s manager, he also racks up enough serious loan-shark debt to put the foursome’s future in jeopardy.
While the film is often lots of fun, it’s quite knowing about how scandals were kept under wraps in the ’60s — and the terrible toll that constant touring took on Frankie and his family (Renée Marino, Erica Piccininni and Freya Tingley play the somewhat underwritten women in Frankie’s life).
The film retains the show’s device of telling the story from each of the four protagonists’ points of view, a breaking of the fourth wall that doesn’t always work on the big screen. But it does here.
Eastwood’s handpicked cast delivers the goods down to the smallest roles. Donnie Kehr manages to be both funny and menacing as a mob rep sent to collect from Tommy before the Seasons’ debut on “The Ed Sullivan Show.’’ And Lomenda’s Nick, who seems like the fourth wheel, stops the show with a climactic speech.
The director even pulls off a tricky coda set at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame 25 years after the original group’s breakup.
“Jersey Boys’’ tells a familiar story, yes — but rarely told this well and with this much heart and soul.