“Across The Universe,” review by Susan Granger

Innovative theatrical director Julie Taymor (“The Lion King”) turns more than 30 Beatles songs into a lavishly phantasmagorical audio/visual experience.

It begins on a Liverpool beach, where a young man, Jude (Jim Sturgess) sits on the sand singing, “Is there anybody going to listen to my story – all about the girl who came to stay? She’s the kind of girl you want so much it makes you sorry; still you don’t regret a single day.”

The girl is Lucy (Evan Rachel Wood), just one of the invented characters, along with her older brother, Max (Joe Anderson), who gets drafted. Somehow they’re sharing a bohemian pad in Greenwich Village – with rockers JoJo (Martin Luther McCoy) and Joplinesque Sadie (Dana Fuchs) and a lesbian cheerleader from Ohio, Prudence (T.V. Carpio), who croons “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” against a football ballet.

Back in 1998, the Bee Gees “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” tried – and failed – to re-create the ‘60s and Beatlemania, so credit 54 year-old Julie Taymor (“Frida,” “Titus”) for courage, collaborating with composer/arranger Elliot Goldenthal, choreographer Daniel Ezralow, along with screenwriters Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais.

“Let It Be” transforms into a gospel hymn set in the Detroit riots, while “Strawberry Fields Forever” is Vietnam-themed. There’s Bono as a Beatnik poet musing “I Am the Walrus” and Salma Hayek as five sexy, sinister nurses who administer morphine to Max in a VA hospital to the strains of “Happiness is a Warm Gun”, plus cameos by Joe Cocker and Eddie Izzard. Not surprisingly, the stylized cinematography ranges from realistic to surreal. On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “Across the Universe” is a unique, if incoherent 7, a fantastic, counterculture voyage to nowhere. All you need is love, man.