Al Pacino defies the sellout in Danny Collins

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      Starring Al Pacino and Christopher Plummer. Rated 14A.

      Like Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter, this entirely invented tale brags about being based on fact, although the “kind of based on a true story” title card should tell you something. The real part started in 1971, with an encouraging letter John Lennon sent to English folkie Steve Tilston that was finally received four decades later, long after the singer had given up his music career.

      For his directorial debut, screenwriting veteran Dan Fogelman (Cars and Crazy, Stupid, Love.) applied that concept to an American success story à la Neil Diamond’s, with green-room-trashing touches of Rod Stewart. In the surprisingly tart Danny Collins, Al Pacino—oddly resembling Sean Penn at times—plays the paunchy, coked-up, and grumbling rocker of the title. He’s content to shout hack-written ditties to dolled-up grannies at lucrative Vegas-type gigs, until he gets a slightly altered version of the letter Lennon really sent.

      This comes courtesy of the singer’s lifelong manager and best pal, played gruffly by Christopher Plummer in a dazzling array of hip threads. He’s just cheering up his number one client, who’s heading into his umpteenth marriage to a forgettable floozy. Instead, Danny plunges into sellout’s remorse, and abruptly decamps to an anonymous New Jersey hotel (a Hilton, actually) to see if he can get back his songwriting mojo.

      The bland location was chosen for its proximity to the grown son he never met. Working-class Tom is bitter about that one-night-stand abandonment and is struggling to survive with his pregnant wife (Jennifer Garner) and a daughter with ADHD (Giselle Eisenberg), who’s more annoying than cute. Luckily, Tom is played by Boardwalk Empire’s Bobby Cannavale. Instead of the fireworks you expect from Pacino, his scenes with Cannavale, and with Annette Bening as an attractively square hotel manager, are tightly modulated displays of contradictory and deeply felt emotions.

      Bolstered by post-Beatles Lennon tunes throughout, the tale wobbles a bit in a climactic concert meant to expose some of Danny’s new material (actually written by Ryan Adams). But Fogelman’s script is so witty, and so humanly forgiving, it subverts its most mawkish impulses. Be sure to stay for the closing credits, which show us Tilston and that now-famous letter.

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