Musicals are practically scientifically designed to lift your spirits. Plots be damned, you can't help but feel a little enraptured after two-plus hours of watching people cut carpet while singing about their deepest feelings. It's a fundamental principle that has allowed Broadway titans like Stephen Sondheim and Andrew Lloyd Webber to reimagine tragic love stories and gothic horror thrillers as spectacles of murder, revenge and, worst of all, dealing with a poor, selfish lead. role. an actor. Even when they end in sadness and despair, you still leave the theater humming their most wonderful endorphin worms (or, if you just watched Cats for the first timemaybe a different kind of high).

What happens, then, when you hire an authority on cinematic melancholy like 21st-century Clint Eastwood to turn your Broadway precedent into a movie? You get Jersey Boys, possibly one of the most irrelevant and silly musicals ever committed to the screen. If you've ever wondered if "Mystic River" or even "Million Dollar Baby" might be a little less depressing if their characters sang about their emotions in between moments of pain, loss and turmoil, the answer, judging by the results here, is no. .. really. Still, while it's not hard to see why Jersey Boys was a flop upon its 2014 release, that same bleakness makes it unique in the modern film music landscape.

The grounded, dark depiction of 1960s rock 'n' roll sensation Eastwood's rapid rise to fame and the good (and especially bad) times that followed The Four Seasons is more true to its source material than you might suspect. The original jukebox Broadway musical written by Rick Ellis and Marshall Brickman (yes, as in co-written by Oscar-winner Annie Hall) eschews the idea of ​​being a fantasy account of the band's story, presenting itself as something of a live-action. a theatrical documentary. Accordingly, The Man With No Name generally avoids the kinds of flights of fancy you'll find in a biographical musical like "Rocketman." Instead, almost all of the songs are diegetic and presented in real light (aside from the end credits), whether it's the Seasons singing live in sequences that Eastwood and his trusted cinematographer Tom Stern have shot with their typically steady, smooth coverage and muted black and brown color palette or the band's music used as a soundtrack for montages, many of which tend to we focus on the more unpleasant bits in the band's story.

What you end up with is a movie that plays a bit like a lackluster version of What You Do! ...and that's even before The Seasons broke out (thanks to all-timer pop classics like "Sherry" and "Big Girls Don't cry") to be tainted by band struggles, mob debts and family hardships. But where Tom Hanks' musical dramedy about a fictional '60s band that skyrockets the Billboard charts mostly manages to make up for its endearing nostalgia with more sobering moments, Eastwood's relentlessly gritty approach clashes with scenes where what "Jersey Boys" wants to be brighter - heartwarming and charming. Most people agree on this point as well, as evidenced by the film Rotten Tomatoes ratings (51 percent from critics, with audiences scoring only slightly higher at 62 percent) and a disappointing box office performance ($67 million worldwide against a $40 million budget).

Still, with its soulful music, themes of flawed masculinity, and a sad tale of the price that comes with a lifetime spent in the spotlight, Jersey Boys is certainly as personal as anything else Eastwood has ever directed. Despite its missteps, it even succeeds as, essentially, the anti-Broadway, a crowd-pleaser and that all-too-rare specimen of a musical that can actually leave you more desperate than you entered. (You know, if that's your thing.)