Jimmy Rabbitte, just a thick-ya out of school, gets a brilliant idea: to put a soul band together in Barrytown, his slum home in north Dublin. First he needs musicians and singers: things slowly start to click when he finds three fine-voiced females virtually in his back yard, a lead singer (Deco) at a wedding, and, responding to his ad, an aging trumpet player, Joey "The Lips" Fagan.
"Jimmy" (Robert Arkins) is a bit of a restless, creative, spirit and a man who is bored with the Dublin music scene. To rectify matters, he and his pal "Joey" (Johnny Murphy) - aka 'The Lips" decide to hold auditions to create a band. A band with an unique sound to challenge the prevailing mediocrity. After some frankly hilarious auditions that pitch the tone deaf straight into the arms of the fashion police, the pair manage to assemble ten folks as different as gin and Guinness. It's no easy task moulding these disparate and lively individuals into one coherent unit, but oddly enough - despite their differences - it's the music from the likes of Mack Rice ("Mustang Sally"), Al Green & Teenie Hodges and a range of established American soul songsters who manage to provide them all with a common language and purpose as they gradually start to gain some traction amongst a sceptical community and an even more cynical music business. It's fair to say that neither "Lips" nor "Jimmy" are high on the list at the diplomatic corps, so keeping these people from - quite literally at times - tearing each other apart is no mean feat. Being a Scot of a certain age from Glasgow, it's easy for me to appreciate the old adage that for many, the escape from post-industrial poverty was music - and both Danny Boyle and Roddy Doyle work well to create and engagingly plausible story of folks whose ambition is not to win a Grammy, but to have enough money to buy their kids milk in the morning. Those they assemble for the band are a myriad of characterful and colourful folks - some likeable, some certainly not - but put them on stage and the toes start tapping and all is forgiven. For a while, at least! There's a sense of real talent here, warts and all - and for just shy of two hours it's a compelling watch that reminded me that most bands started out with a talent scouting mechanism that didn't require the likes of Simon Cowell.
