Sketch comedy

In its big-screen incarnation, 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.

In a charmingly casual way, the film version finds a quirky sort of backstage musical emerging from the amiably elegiac ramblings of Keillor and Altman alike. And the resulting cinematic variety show becomes an offbeat variation on the radio show, with material from recurring sketches like “Guy Noir, Private Eye” and “Lives of the Cowboys” getting recycled, and re-imagined, into rather different (and no less interesting) form.

The film’s Guy Noir (Kevin Kline) is now a key player in the overall action, and Lefty and Dusty are now rowdy cowboy musicians instead of facetiously fictional cowhands. And a darkly mysterious blonde (Virginia Madsen in a white trench coat) haunts the characters and the proceedings in ways that extend well beyond the noir-ish fillips of the radio show’s “Guy Noir” episodes.

The predictable unpredictability of all this is bound to be an irritation to some viewers. But the Altman/Keillor mix of the conventional and the unconventional makes for a melancholy sort of comedy that can prove surprisingly rewarding.