The Minnesota deadpan host rasps, “feet on the ground, hopes up high, and the humor dry.” Combine these Scandinavian Lutheran values with the character-study vignette talent of the director, mix in a cast working for love, and you get “radio like you’ve never seen it before,” the film A Prairie Home Companion.

Author and creator-MC of that cult radio show, Garrison Keillor approached Robert Altman about writing a script, which the two Midwesterners decided would involve a storyline about a radio show much like Keillor’s. The variety-show format of the heard program in a seen movie never exactly breathes the life of true narrative into its uneven mosaic pattern, so may not appeal to a wide public and perhaps not even to every single one of the many NPR-outlet faithful. But it's worth the seeing -- for the performances, the unhurried low-key tone, the Americana hopefulness, the unabashed cornball. Also for its spirited music, a medley of homegrown standards, classics, hymns, wonderfully awful commercial jingles and pieces by Keillor himself, which latter include a sidesplitting “Bad Jokes” by feuding singing cowboys, “Pachelbels of the Prairie” Dusty (Woody Harrelson) and Lefty (John C. Reilly), not to mention harmonizing by a quartet’s two remaining (Wanda and Sandra are gone) Johnson Sisters, Rhonda (Lily Tomlin) and Yolanda (Meryl Streep).

Far from its namesake’s nationally syndicated success, the film airwaves program is a local weekend thing that, according to reliable rumor, has been bought up by Texans and is to be spring cleaned out and shut down. So narrates noir private eye-security guard Guy Noir (Kevin Kline, whose slapstick-y humor has never appealed to me). Live radio, he cynically grouses, died fifty years ago, “only somebody forgot to tell them,” but the new owners’ Axeman (Tommy Lee Jones, as Mr. Cruet) is on his way to remedy that.

The film program’s cast -- a comfortable mix of movie stars and regulars and crew from the real-life show -- knows, too, sort of, but hopes not. Regardless, the show must go on, backstage tears notwithstanding, and herein lies the thread. His own career a throwback, a triumph against the current, Keillor believes that “Midwestern people would accept their demise with a certain aplomb,” and in a sense death is the theme -- or, rather, an existential quietude that acknowledges Grim Reaper and Axeman but honors life.

Generaled by unflappable host G.K. (Keillor, guest speaker following a Film Society of Lincoln Center special preview screening), an almost cold fish full of contradictory tall tales, but held together by crew, stagehands and a lunch lady (Marylouise Burke), this “things as normal” final show is shadowed by both life and America’s obsession with death, from Yolanda’s fashionably suicide-fascinated daughter Lola (Lindsay Lohan), a real killer heart attack, and the death (and later resurrection) of the program and its performers, to the angel Asphodel, who comes to “comfort people that are desperately sad.”

A movie convention, this angel called Dangerous Woman (Virginia Madsen) was once Lois Peterson, a fan who fatally crashed her car listening to PHC on the lonely way to a rendezvous with lover Larry. Usually visible solely to a vain Noir who thinks to charm her beauty, she gradually appears to select others, too, to “open heart[s] to the fullness of time and spirit, love” and ease their inevitable journey. Too consciously ethereal, she will however prove useful in the practical plot world, such as it is. By way of a perhaps not entirely innocent remark of hers, the film steers clear of what threatens to be the icky resolution of melting heartless Axeman through a reunion with his younger days Dukes of Rhythm band.

The Altman eye for quirks and throwaway details like Dusty’s Man With No Name stogie and Keillor’s wise wry observation of his fellows’ deep-down goodness, are what carry this crafted piece. For those who seek action or stronger plotting than these individual beads on a string, or whose dish is not hominess spiced with an F.Scott Fitzgerald vision of the values of plains and prairie, the effort may not wash. But for the lucky few, this reminder to love life as if “every show is the last show,” should sparkle like its opening night sky and Aurora Borealis. 

(Released by Picturehouse and rated "PG-13" for risque humor.)