"Jersey Boys" isn't just a movie set in the '50s and early '60s. It looks like a movie from that time, too. 
 
 The muted color palette is pure Ektachrome. Several of the houses and streets are clearly studio mockups. When the characters go for a drive, you'd almost swear it was bad back projection. 
 
 It's lovely. 
 
 And then those songs kick in — "Walk Like a Man," "Sherry," "Big Girls Don't Cry" — and the years melt away. 
 
 But as deliberately, consciously old-fashioned as it sometimes is, Clint Eastwood's "Jersey Boys" is also often fresh, with a self-aware sense of fun that concludes with the whole cast dancing down one of those studio back-lot streets. 
 
 If you never saw the Broadway musical — and at this point, in this state, that might be grounds for expulsion — it's the story of the Four Seasons, the Garden State boys who survived bad business decisions, breakups and the Beatles, to sell records to several generations. 
 
 Like the show, the film also has its characters telling their own stories — often directly to the camera, with a wink, a shrug and a whole lot of Jersey attitude. 
 
 If you have seen the musical, though, you'll recognize many of the actors. Bucking the usual Hollywood practice, most of the parts have been cast not with stars, but with performers who've already played the roles either on Broadway or on national tour, the standout still John Lloyd Young as Frankie Valli. 
 
 The chief exceptions to the original-cast philosophy are Christopher Walken, who shows up as real-life mobster "Gyp" DeCarlo, and Vince Piazza of "Boardwalk Empire," who gets the crucial role of the wheeling, dealing (and disastrously gambling) Tommy DeVito. 
 
 Walken is wonderful, as always, although the role is really superfluous — he's there chiefly as a symbol for the Jersey mob. But Piazza is terrific — his character is the first narrator we meet and even when he's off the screen he dominates the film. 
 
 And although the script is far too fanstruck of the Four Seasons' prime movers, Valli and Bob Gaudio — their only sins, it seems, is that they just cared too much and worked too hard — Young does another fine job making Valli warmly, audibly real. 
 
 The music helps him, too. There are one or two off notes — the brass section behind "Can't Take My Eyes Off of You" is a little tinny — but it's a fun and faithful score, and you'll be surprised at how many of these songs you know, even if you were never a big fan. 
 
 And while some of the songs are shoehorned in (and having Valli croon "My Eyes Adored You" to his kid is just creepy, especially since the second line is "Though I never laid a hand on you...") the soundtrack still manages to cover the group's long, varied history. 
 
 Of course, the movie is a little long too, and overly reverent. But natives will love the Jersey references (including someone playing Joe Pesci, a DeVito pal and early Four Seasons' booster). And if you stay for the final, closing-credits curtain-call number — and you should — no one will blame you if you join in, just a little. 
 
 Ratings note: The film contains strong language and substance abuse. 
 
 'Jersey Boys' (R) Warner Bros. (134 min.) 
 
 Directed by Clint Eastwood. With John Lloyd Young, Christopher Walken. Now playing in New Jersey. 
 
 ★ ★ ★ 
 
 
 
 MORE JERSEY BOYS COVERAGE 
 
 • Frankie Valli remembers Newark home as 'safe haven' 
 
 • Ahead of 'Jersey Boys' film, 10 tunes from The Four Seasons 
 
 • 'Jersey Boys': Cast revels in journey from stage to screen 
 
 • Renee Marino: a Jersey Girl stars in 'Jersey Boys' 
 
 • Clint Eastwood on 'Jersey Boys,' taking risks and a life well lived ||||| For a bunch of desk jockeys, the boys from Consolidated Life are surprisingly athletic. In Rob Ashford’s revival of the 1968 musical “Promises, Promises,” which opened on Sunday night at the Broadway Theater, the male members of the chorus demonstrate that wearing skinny suits needn’t keep corporate executives from playing leap frog, turning cart wheels, bouncing off desks or frugging like, well, mad men. 
 
 Yet for all their gymnastic exertions, there’s no escaping the feeling that these guys are one set of really tired businessmen. No matter how high they jump or how much body heat they expend, they never manage to push the evening’s temperature much above lukewarm. 
 
 Even that singing sparkplug Kristin Chenoweth, who stars opposite a charming Sean Hayes in his Broadway debut, seems to feel the prevailing lassitude. “Promises, Promises,” which features a book by Neil Simon and songs by Burt Bacharach and Hal David, comes fully to life only briefly, at the beginning of its second act, when a comic volcano named Katie Finneran erupts into molten hilarity. Otherwise the white-hot charms this musical is said to have once possessed are left sleeping. 
 
 Tepid was not an adjective anyone was using after the opening of the original “Promises, Promises,” a story of sex in the office based on the Oscar-winning Billy Wilder film “The Apartment” (1960). “You feel more in the mood to send it a congratulatory telegram than write a review,” Clive Barnes, the critic for The New York Times, said of the show, adding that Mr. Bacharach’s music “reflects today rather than the day before yesterday.” 
 
 Of course, todays, especially the todays of the hip and trendy, have a way of turning into yellowing yesterdays. When “Promises, Promises” was revived by the Encores! series of concerts in 1997, its leering view of secretaries as disposable playthings seemed uncomfortably quaint, despite a flashy shindig of a production by Rob Marshall. And the bubbly Bacharach-David songs (including the pop hit “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again”) had taken on the synthetic whiff of elevator music. 
 
 So the announcement last year that “Promises, Promises” was to be remounted on Broadway would have provoked a blanket “what are they thinking?” response, except for one thing: a seductive, styled-to-the-teeth little television show called “Mad Men.” Set in a Manhattan advertising agency around the time of the Kennedy presidency, this AMC series made it safe for early 1960s sexism to come out of the closet, provided it was treated with anthropological distance and mouth-watering period glamour. 
 
 I’m presuming that “Mad Men” is the reason this “Promises, Promises” is set not in the late ’60s, as the original was, but in 1962. Anyway, instead of wearing bright minidresses and bangs, the women are trussed up in midcalf suits (designed by Bruce Pask) and stiff, lacquered hair, as rectangular (or square) in appearance as the modernist architectural motifs of Scott Pask’s set. (Bruce Pask is also the director of men’s fashion for T: The Times Style Magazine.) 
 
 These office girls are, to be honest, rather frumpy things, and the men with whom they make assignations aren’t exactly hot stuff. Mr. Ashford, the show’s choreographer as well as director, seems to regard the members of both sexes with faint distaste. Even when they cut loose, as in the big (and smartly reinvented) office Christmas party number, they don’t seem to be having any fun. 
 
 This joyless world is the backdrop for the moral coming of age of Chuck Baxter (Mr. Hayes), an unremarkable young man on the make who discovers an unexpected route up the ladder. That’s by lending his apartment to married men in need of trysting places, who include the head of the company, the handsome, coldblooded J. D. Sheldrake (Tony Goldwyn in a thankless part). He, it turns out, is having an affair with the object of Chuck’s romantic fantasies, the adorable Fran Kubelik (Ms. Chenoweth). 
 
 Chuck pines, sucks up, drinks up, suffers pangs of conscience and, in the second act, develops a spine, all the while confiding to the audience in ingratiating asides. Mr. Hayes, best known for the sitcom “Will & Grace,” locates a winning physical clownishness within this sad-sack character (originated, believe it or not, by Jerry Orbach). He also has an agreeable, suitably conversational singing voice. 
 
 Yet except when he’s with Ms. Finneran (more on whom later), who plays a crazy barfly, his emotions often seem pale to the point of colorlessness. It’s easy enough to like Chuck but hard to feel for him. And his relationship with Ms. Chenoweth’s Fran feels more like that of a younger brother than a would-be lover and protector. 
 
 As for Ms. Chenoweth, dearly though I love her, this hyper-talented star was not meant to play Fran, and you sense that she knows it. Fran is a vulnerable waif; Ms. Chenoweth is a diva who can’t help taking charge of any stage. She is also unwisely made up and coiffed to resemble Angie Dickinson (the former Mrs. Burt Bacharach, as it happens) at her 1960s peak of hard-sheen attractiveness. This gal is nobody’s doormat. 
 
 Two recognizable songs by Mr. Bacharach and Mr. David not in the original score have been interpolated for Ms. Chenoweth to sing: “I Say a Little Prayer” and “A House Is Not a Home.” But though she works hard on putting them over, with inflections borrowed variously from Motown and Dolly Parton, Bacharach requires a cool, low-simmering style that is not Ms. Chenoweth’s. 
 
 Nor is it a style that most of the cast (which also includes the salty veteran Dick Latessa) seems equipped to sell, and the songs tend to blend into a trickly stream. The nudging jokes, on the other hand, stick out sorely, not because they’re politically incorrect but because they’re usually so darn dated. (Chuck, stumbling onto a couple necking at an office party, observes that they must be especially drunk, since they’re married to each other.) 
 
 Nothing in the languorous first act prepares you for the jolt of energy that begins the second. That’s when Ms. Finneran shows up as a singles-bar stalker named Marge, a molting flamingo of a woman whose pickup line is that she is not a pickup. When Marge homes in on Chuck, the evening’s first sparks are struck, and we are reminded that sexual desperation can be very, very funny. 
 
 Doing the freshest variations I’ve seen in years on over-the-top, deluded drunkenness, Ms. Finneran and Mr. Hayes turn their single shared number, “A Fact Can Be a Beautiful Thing,” into a showstopper you wish would never end. Ms. Finneran is on view for only, say, a quarter of an hour. I can’t be sure exactly, because it’s true that time not only flies but also stretches deliciously when you’re having fun. That means that once Ms. Finneran exits, it’s all too easy to count the remaining minutes. 
 
 PROMISES, PROMISES 
 
 Book by Neil Simon; music by Burt Bacharach; lyrics by Hal David; based on the screenplay “The Apartment” by Billy Wilder and I. A. L. Diamond, by arrangement with MGM On Stage; directed and choreographed by Rob Ashford; orchestrations by Jonathan Tunick; music director, Phil Reno; sets by Scott Pask; costumes by Bruce Pask; lighting by Donald Holder; sound by Brian Ronan; hair and wig design by Tom Watson; music coordinator, Howard Joines; dance music arrangements by David Chase; associate director/choreographer, Christopher Bailey; associate producers, Michael McCabe/Joseph Smith, Stage Ventures 2009 and No. 2 Limited Partnership; executive producer, Beth Williams. Presented by Broadway Across America, Craig Zadan, Neil Meron, the Weinstein Company/Terry Allen Kramer, Candy Spelling, Pat Addiss, Bernie Abrams/Michael Speyer, Takonkiet Viravan/Scenario Thailand and Norton Herrick/Barry and Fran Weissler/TBS Service/Laurel Oztemel. At the Broadway Theater, 1681 Broadway; (212) 239-6200. Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes. 
 
 WITH: Sean Hayes (Chuck Baxter), Kristin Chenoweth (Fran Kubelik), Tony Goldwyn (J. D. Sheldrake), Katie Finneran (Marge MacDougall), Dick Latessa (Dr. Dreyfuss), Brooks Ashmanskas (Mr. Dobitch), Peter Benson (Mike Kirkeby), Sean Martin Hingston (Mr. Eichelberger) and Ken Land (Jesse Vanderhof).
– What do you get when you mix Clint Eastwood and a Tony Award-winning musical? That would be Jersey Boys, the film version of the Broadway show starring John Lloyd Young as Frankie Valli and Christopher Walken as a mobster. So will you be singing along or dozing in your seat? Critics aren't wildly impressed, with the movie scoring a 57% on Rotten Tomatoes and a 54 on Metacritic. "As deliberately, consciously old-fashioned as it sometimes is, Clint Eastwood's Jersey Boys is also often fresh, with a self-aware sense of fun," writes Stephen Whitty at the Star-Ledger. While there are "one or two off notes," he adds that Broadway star Young "does another fine job making Valli warmly, audibly real." Seen the Broadway version? You'll find that the film "adds dialogue and subtracts music," writes Mark Jenkins at NPR. It may be "undercooked," with "little sense of context, either social or musical," but Jersey Boys is also "engagingly lively, if not always graceful, and often surprisingly comic," Jenkins notes. At the Globe and Mail, Geoff Pevere calls it a "flat-as-a-platter adaptation." Granted, it's not all bad. "The movie perks up somewhat during the musical numbers" and the cast is "pitch perfect." But "trust me, you've watched condominium lobby channels that are more exciting than this." Oh, and the hair pieces "look like freshly fallen squirrel pelts." So is Eastwood entirely to blame? Well, according to Joe Williams at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, "the worst thing about this multifaceted failure is the Oscar winner behind the camera." Taking a stab at Eastwood's empty chair gag, he notes, "Where there ought to be a director, there's nothing but an empty chair." If you were planning on seeing Jersey Boys, "Fuhgeddaboudit."