BERLIN -- Not since Woody Allen's "Radio Days" has anyone created such a cinematic Valentine to the wonderfully imaginative medium of radio as "A Prairie Home Companion." Garrison Keillor, impresario, creator and host of one of radio's longest running programs -- 31 years and counting -- and director Robert Altman are a match made in heaven. To these two Midwesterners, the region's dry, whimsical humor, unfailing politeness and straight-shooting sensibility are as natural as their own skins. There is no artifice or slickness here, just a native, keen intelligence that slyly hides behind homespun wit and verbal slapstick.

Keillor's radio show is, of course, beloved by many and Altman's movie, as Altman movies so often do, comes heavily populated with marquee actors. So the domestic theatrical audience for "Prairie" should be wide and varied. Overseas is a tough call: So much of the movie relies on deep-grained American humor along with puns and word play in English that get lost in subtitles. Nevertheless, an audience here at the Berlinale responded favorably to the music-flavored film even if some of verbal gags fell flat.

Filmed at St. Paul's Fitzgerald Theater in Keillor's home state of Minnesota, "Prairie" essentially puts a radio show much like "A Prairie Home Companion" on film. Backstage, onstage and around the aging theater, the movie (written by Keillor from a story by him and Ken LaZebnik) imagines a fateful final broadcast of a show that has been given the axe by a soulless Texas corporation. (Keillor knows how to pick his villain's state, doesn't he?)

The central musical acts belong to Yolanda and Rhonda Johnson (Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin), the remaining members of what once was a four-sister country music act, and Dusty and Lefty (Woody Harrelson and John C. Reilly), singing cowboys and rivals in one-upsmanship.

Yolanda's daughter Lola (Lindsay Lohan) distracts herself from her mom's oft-told tales of the theatrical life by penning poems about suicide. Guy Noir, a recurring character on Keillorr's show, is brought aboard here as the program's "security director." As the throwback detective, Kevin Kline mixes Chandler-esque dialogue with more than a touch of Peter Seller's Inspector Clouseau.

The broadcast's harried stage manager (Tim Russell, a regular on Keillor's show) and his assistant ("Saturday Night Live's" Maya Rudolph) are given new ways to break into sweat by the unpredictable cast. And through all the delightful confusion and musical numbers drift two iconic figures: GK (Keillor himself), a benign, unruffled presence who smoothly adapts to all exigencies, and a Dangerous Woman (Virginia Madsen), an angel in a white trench coat, taking the earthly and shapely form of a woman who died listening to the show's broadcast. It was a penguin joke that done her in.

Minor attempts to introduce plot material -- such as an unlikely past affair between Yolanda and GK, the death of a performer and the arrival of the corporate axeman (Tommy Lee Jones) -- never lead anywhere. Even the filmmakers seem to forget them moments after their introduction.

No, the movie steadfastly sticks to its radio roots. The comic bits from Streep & Tomlin and Harrelson & Reilly are gems of off-the-cuff humor. Keillor's droll lyrics and jingles for fictional sponsors poke good-natured fun. The toe-tapping musical performances are refreshingly captured by Edward Lachman's mobile camera, all smoothly edited by Jacob Craycroft.

As a character remarks, this radio show is the kind of program that died 50 years ago only someone forgot to tell the performers. Thank God for that.

By TODD MCCARTHY


Rib-ticklingly funny at times and genial as all get-out, Robert Altman's take on Garrison Keillor's three-decades-old Minnesota institution is about nothing more or less than the privileged musical and behavioral moments created by the engagingly diverse cast. The shambling, oddly diffident Keillor makes a curious central figure, and there are few if any recent precedents to indicate if a loyal radio audience will follow its enthusiasm from the airwaves to movie houses. But the "Prairie Home Companion" brand name and likely upbeat word-of-mouth should translate into nice specialized biz, with crossover to significant Middle American consumption possible if all the cards come up right for Picturehouse upon skedded June 9 release.

From a story he worked out with Ken LaZebnik, Keillor concocted the screenplay about a radio show very much like the one he's been broadcasting since July 1974 from St. Paul, Minn. With the exception of framing scenes at an Edward Hopperesque diner, entire pic takes place as the "fictional" show prepares for its final broadcast before its longtime home, the Fitzgerald Theater, is demolished by Texas real estate interests for Joni Mitchell's proverbial parking lot.

But no big deal is made of the occasion, as GK, as he's called, prefers to shuffle along as if it's just another program. With Edward Lachman's stealthy HD cameras constantly on the move, Altman follows the various participants on and backstage, capturing their quirks, preoccupations and agendas as their private and professional lives seamlessly mix.

It's an artistic scheme the director has used numerous times before, including in his films about other artistic milieu, such as "The Company" (dance), "Kansas City" (jazz), "Ready-to-Wear" (fashion), "The Player" (film), "Vincent & Theo" (painting) and "Nashville" (country music).

Altman's first significant professional job was as a radio writer, and while the film is scarcely concerned with craft and mechanics, there is a comfort with the setting that dovetails with the helmer's evident delight in the performers he's put in front of the camera; no trace here of the condescension that has sometimes marred his work.

Private detective Guy Noir is one of the "Companion's" memorable longtime characters, and here he's been slightly reimagined as a chronically underemployed investigator who handles security for the show. Wonderfully enacted by Kevin Kline in '40s threads and attitudes, Guy is supposed to keep an eye on things (while narrating the tale) but becomes distracted by a mysterious blonde (Virginia Madsen) who materializes to insinuate herself into the proceedings in unforeseeable ways.

Also carrying over from Keillor's actual show are cowboy crooners Dusty and Lefty (Woody Harrelson, John C. Reilly), whose ongoing banter culminates in a final number, "Bad Jokes," in which the off-color lyrics are indeed as bad as they are hilarious. Adding more down-home flavor is L.Q. Jones as a vet country singer.

But the most prominent singers here are Yolanda and Rhonda Johnson (Meryl Streep, Lily Tomlin), the surviving half of what used to be a promising quartet of sisters. In the company of Yolanda's teen daughter Lola (Lindsay Lohan), who writes suicide poetry, the two gals yack on in wacky ways about family, special memories and disappointments, one of which, for Yolanda, includes an aborted romance with GK; this story strand is understated in the extreme, but informs Streep's interactions with Keillor in a funny way.

So unhurried and distractible is GK that it seems a wonder that he can stay on top of all the demands of hosting the radio show. That he can is a tribute to his very pregnant assistant stage manager Molly (Maya Rudolph), for at the slightest provocation Keillor will launch into a story or anecdote that inevitably takes a while to tell. You might have to go back all the way to James Stewart to find a bigscreen antecedent for Keillor's folksy Midwestern manner and leisurely verbal style.

All through the show, GK refuses to acknowledge that it's the finale. "Every show's your last show. That's my philosophy," he explains. Nor will he mention it when one cast member dies offstage during the broadcast; "I don't do eulogies."

While these lines may well have come straight from Keillor, one can only imagine they have a special resonance for Altman, who was 80 when the film was shot, something the film's fleet style doesn't betray for a moment. The specter of death, or at least the end of something, hovers over the enterprise, but in the lightest possible way, as if to ignore it -- as GK ignores the theater's impending doom -- is the only possible policy.

The musical numbers are brief, spirited and thoroughly delightful, all backed by Keillor's actual house band. Tom Keith, his sound effects man, also gets the spotlight for a couple of diverting minutes.

Amusement comes from many sources, although first among equals are Kline, whose comic timing in an uproariously silly phone scene, is in a class comparable to Buster Keaton and Cary Grant, and Harrelson, who locks in a hitherto unknown dry drollness that lifts his every line.

Tommy Lee Jones turns up toward the end as the Texas "axe man" come to witness the final moments of the Fitzgerald (named for St. Paul's own F. Scott, a bust of whom Guy Noir scavenges as a keepsake).