A Prairie Home Companion

In its big-screen incarnation, A Prairie Home Companion is very much about the long-running public radio show of the same name, but not entirely identical to it. Garrison Keillor himself wrote the screenplay, and he has a major role in the central action, which is ostensibly an account of a “final” performance of the show before it and the St. Paul Theatre, which is its home, are shut down. But this is also a film by director Robert Altman—which is to say: a free-form, floating mixture of comedy and drama with a dozen or so characters wandering into and out of, and back into, view. Keillor has written it that way as well, and while he and assorted regulars from the radio version are variously present, the filmic rendition also features a good many characters played by movie actors—with Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin (as two singing sisters) and Woody Harrelson and John C. Reilly (as two guitar-strumming jokers in cowboy hats) providing the most amusing and appealing results.