Philip Seymour Hoffman stars in "Pirate Radio."

There's a moment, late into the new period comedy "Pirate Radio," when the film goes for broke, tossing its characters into a hopelessly dire situation that resolves in miraculous fashion.

It is here where any literal viewer will shake his head at all this situation and where any true lover of rock will beam with joy.

For this music, and this time in the genre's history, was less about reality than about defying reality. And if that means a preposterous celebration of an irreverent soundtrack, then so be it.

"Pirate Radio" is a big, brash, unapologetic love letter to those souls that forged a new pop culture - not just the disc jockeys who had the ear and the courage to push the sonic spectrum, or the financiers who decided to shelter these rebels so they could launch their revolution, but also to all those young pairs of ears who found a way around the expectations of the previous generation to embrace something new and exciting.

In some of the film's earliest scenes, we see the many teenagers and 20-somethings who sneak away late at night and turn up the radio waves beaming from ships floating not far from Britain.

Rock ‘n' roll was not widely accepted in this country in the 1960s, and few official radio stations would interrupt the classical music to blast the guitars that were electrifying a generation.

And so the answer came in the form of pirate boats, with pirate antennae and pirate personalities, uttering obscenities into microphones between playing their forbidden vinyl. If the history and the premise sound rebellious, just wait until you meet the disc jockeys. There's the smooth talker and the American expat (Philip Seymour Hoffman), there's the audiophile who works the morning shift who no one has met and the wacky guy who tells all the jokes.

Surrounding them is the support staff that makes this ship work - the news guy, the boat owner (a glorious Bill Nighy) - and we are guided through this world through the eyes of the owner's nephew who has arrived to spend a summer at sea.

Even though occasional dramatic developments occur, such as one man's hastily arranged wedding and the continued campaign of censorship by those in the British government, this is mostly a celebration of the ragtag camaradarie that connected these music junkies, and the way that this community was forming across the nation without their even realizing it. A British official spends his days trying to figure out how to shut the pirates down, and then after he leaves the office his secretary turns on the radio and rocks out.

There's a hint of melodrama; that much is certain. When the government finally tracks down the pirate ship, the stakes soar a bit too high. In one moody evening scene, Hoffman takes to the top deck and muses about the fact that he's well aware these are the best days of his life. Sooner or later, the government will crack down, or commercial radio will catch up, and this sense of freedom at sea behind the turntable will be lost forever.

"Pirate Radio" is by no means Shakespeare, or even "High Fidelity," but I loved the way it turns its back on the concerns of a conventional story to instead bask in the sinful ecstasy that was early rock ‘n' roll.

It makes me remember all those stories my dad told me about spinning records at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. He played the songs that commercial radio wouldn't dare touch in first days of the 1970s. How big was the audience? It didn't matter; he was connecting with the music, and he was putting it out there, creating a vibe.

That's what "Pirate Radio" gets right - it might be short on logic, but it's got a whole lot of vibe.