Robin Williams as a disc jockey for Armed Forces Radio in Saigon, ca. 1965, where he fights for the Beach Boys, James Brown, Martha and the Vandellas, and against Lawrence Welk, Ray Coniff, Mantovani, and intersperses machine-gun bursts of light patter: "It's oh-six hundred. What's the 'oh' stand for? 'Oh my God it's early!'" and "What town you stationed in? I'm stationed in Poon Tang" and so on. A good deal of the patter, contrary to the cited examples, is actually funny -- and one shudders to think of how much encouragement this sort of thing could give to that lowliest American art form: deejay humor. However that might be, this is an ideal vehicle for Williams's trunkful of voices and his motor-mouthed stream of consciousness (more like a white-water rapids of consciousness). But his shifts between voices and subjects are one thing; his shifts, off the air, into whole different modes -- soulfulness, champion of the First Amendment, civil-rights activist, goodwill ambassador to the Third World -- are not nearly so persuasive, not nearly so free of gear-grinding. And his chief antagonists -- a self-styled humorist who mails jokes to The Reader's Digest and who believes the radio audience isn't getting enough polkas; and a humorless hard-nose whose antagonism doesn't stop at sending the deejay deliberately into the teeth of the Viet Cong -- are just tenpins. What substantially offsets this is the character of the older commanding officer (Noble Willingham), who, while having nothing in common with the deejay, is sufficiently broad-minded to find him funny nonetheless. With Forest Whitaker, Bruno Kirby; directed by Barry Levinson. (1987) — Duncan Shepherd
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