More a whimper than a bang

Is there life after hippiedom? Rather too much of it, perhaps, in Rob Dolman's raucous comedy.

Goldie Hawn and Susan Sarandon are ex-groupies who meet up 20 years after the beads, gigs and flings with the roadies. Hawn is a tattooed and collagened mess who's just been fired as bartender at the local Whiskey-a-Go-Go hellhole. Her claim to fame is that Jim Morrison once passed out with her underneath him.

To pull herself together she sets off to Phoenix for a sympathetic hug from her old pal. But Sarandon's turned herself into Phoenix's first lady, all tailored beige, with spoilt brats in the "kids' wing" of her lawyer hubby's palatial spread, and at first doesn't want to know her.

Geoffrey Rush comes into the film, kind of, as a picky, gay screenwriter whom Hawn takes along for the ride. The three of them pull down all their emotional zips in a comedy about the eruptions that revelations of a footloose past can cause when you're over 50.

It's supposed to be a chickflick for that age-group, but it may look grim even to people well under this target-audience, as the two women regress to their liberated days.

Sarandon loses her table manners and starts throwing chicken cacciatore at her husband's stuffed shirtfront, then crops her hair, slips into snakeskin pants and goes disco-ing till dawn.

The big moment both "girls" share is rediscovering the set of Polaroids they took of rock musicians' erections.

My sympathies were with Rush, who's not got much of a part - after all, what can a token eunuch do when the girls are having all the fun? - but plays gamely on his sexlessness for what laughs there are in that state.

It's undeniably turbulent and colourful and the presence of yesterday's stars may have a lot of nostalgic value.

Some of the smaller touches are amusing - Sarandon plonking a CND badge on her denim blouson to go hippie again, but forgetting to take off her ladylike string of pearls.

Those of a higher sensibility will relish the inside view it provides of manor houses and morals in Arizona.

The kids in it are unbearable, but because the movie ultimately sucks up to their generation they get to deliver the valedictory message loud and shrill: "Go into the world and do it true." (And make sure it pays.)