Great Beatles songs will survive idiotic 'Universe'

A huge whopping disaster is so much more interesting than a run-of-the-mill failure, which may be why "Across the Universe" is both appalling and occasionally exhilarating.

This is one for the "Moulin Rouge" crowd: a musical (performed mostly by non-singers) that leans heavily on familiar pop songs. Not just any pop songs, either, but the Beatles catalog, which taken as a whole is perhaps the greatest joy-making work of the last half of the 20th century.

"Across the Universe" is the brainchild of director Julie Taymor, who did the Broadway "Lion King" and the Frida Kahlo biopic "Frida." Taymor is both visually imaginative and thuddingly literal-minded, a combination that defines this crazy movie.

With a free pass through the Beatles songbook (Sony Pictures also owns the tunes), Taymor and veteran screenwriters Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais have invented an amazingly cliched story line to suit the music. For starters, the character names come from Beatles songs, a truly bad idea.

Jude (Jim Sturgess) is a Liverpool lad in the 1960s who escapes his dreary life as a dockworker and lands in New York City bohemia. Joining him are two rich kids (Evan Rachel Wood and Joe Anderson), a Janis Joplinesque singer (Dana Fuchs), and a Hendrix-like guitarist (Martin Luther McCoy). Among others.

The Vietnam War intrudes on this idyll, along with hippies and drugs and gurus. There are some musical cameos along the road: Bono does "I Am the Walrus," Eddie Izzard wisecracks his way through "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite," and Joe Cocker gives some welcome rasp to "Come Together."

The era is appealing, but the story is so dumb you'll have a better chance of enjoying this movie if you watch it as a series of music videos. I liked seeing the lesbian cheerleader (T.V. Carpio) wading in slow motion through tumbling football players as "I Want to Hold Your Hand" plays (her singing synchronized to the non-slo-mo soundtrack — nice), and the solarized colors of "I Am the Walrus" brought back fond memories of past movie acid trips.

The songs are just so freaking great that sometimes they take over; it's impossible to stay immune to the effervescence of "I've Just Seen a Face," played out in a bowling alley.

Taymor's pretentiousness swamps numbers like "I Want You," a Draft Board nightmare that includes soldiers lugging a Statue of Liberty across a miniature Southeast Asian landscape. She's so heavy that when she gets to the line "If you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao" in "Revolution," she has to include a picture of Chairman Mao. Ooof.

The performers are all right, and Joe Anderson looks like a future star, but the singing by the leads is strained. Jim Sturgess, whose resemblance to the young Paul McCartney is incredible, sounds as though he had Ewan McGregor's vocal coach from "Moulin Rouge."

Well, it's not the legendarily bad 1979 Bee Gees movie, "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band." But it's bad in its own giddy way, so bad that a cult following is probably already forming.