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When a young player in Jimmy McMahon’s band tries to improvise, he’s stifled. "There’s no jazz in a céilí band," Jimmy tells him. There’s not much deviation from formula in this tuneful, picturesque, hackneyed tale of sibling rivalry and lost and nascent love, either. In mid-’60s Liverpool, expatriate Jimmy (Colm Meaney) decides to return to the country he left two decades previously and compete in the annual All-Ireland Céilí Band competition. His estranged brother John Joe (Bernard Hill), who never left County Clare, has entered his band as well, and the pair wage a faintly amusing war of mutual sabotage (stolen tires, "customs" searches) as they journey to the competition site. Once they arrive, the younger people take over, with Jimmy’s gifted flute player Teddy becoming sweet on John Joe’s talented fiddler Anne, who may be the only person in the film or the audience who doesn’t know the secret of her mystery parentage. Will the two lovers prevail? Will brotherly bygones be bygones? Anyone who knows how to join in on the chorus of a Clancy Brothers song will have no trouble figuring it out. Veteran director John Irvin plays out the romantic comic conventions dutifully but doesn’t allow much space for the music, jazzed up or not. The best part of the film is the rousing version of "Whiskey in the Jar" over the end credits. (90 minutes)
BY PETER KEOUGH
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