Rock's burning secret

This is a curious little film that goes halfway towards being something of a gem, but unfortunately doesn't quite make it. On the face of it, it's an unprepossessing tale. The late Gram Parsons was a guitarist, a singer and innovator - although he despised the term - of "country rock". His was the distinctively jangling, melodic sound behind the successes of bands such as The Flying Burrito Brothers and The Byrds. In true rock 'n' roll fashion, he played hard and, well, played hard; so hard in fact, that in 1973 he found himself dead at 27 of a drug overdose in the distinctly tacky surroundings of a motel room on the fringes of California's Sonoma Desert.

Enter Phil Kaufman (Johnny Knoxville), his hard-drinking wiseacre of a road manager. Kaufman and Parsons had made a deep and solemn promise to one another: whoever expired first, the other was to take their body into the desert and burn it. There were to be no square funerals or grieving relatives for this duo, they wanted to send their smoke up into the clear air of the wilderness that they loved.

So, when Kaufman gets the news that his friend has indeed taken the ultimate trip, he determines to honour his promise. What follows is a bizarre road movie, part Grand Guignol, part farce, at once reminiscent of the black comedies of Joe Orton and the scabrous rants of Hunter S Thompson.

Kaufman steals the corpse from Los Angeles Airport, with the unwitting assistance of a spaced-out hippy, Larry Oster-Berg (Michael Shannon), who happens to have a canary-yellow hearse covered with a flowery motif. The two men are hotly pursued by Barbara (Christina Applegate), Parsons's avaricious girlfriend, and - more seriously - by the late guitar hero's grieving father, Stanley (Robert Forster). As they barrel out of

LA towards the desert, and the Joshua Tree Inn where Parsons died, a series of picaresque encounters take place, with cops, officialdom, and their pursuers.

I've no doubt that the story has been gussied up in all sorts of ways to make a more acceptable tale. Certainly, one of the people in the screening with me dissented loudly on the streets of Soho afterwards, saying that Parsons's family remained deeply traumatised by the events surrounding his death, and sickened by the capital the real-life Kaufman has made out of his alfresco, bandit cremation.

But none of this is either here or there, because Grand Theft Parsons aims explicitly to elevate its story to the level of myth. Kaufman's act is depicted as the very summit of friendship, a suitable coda to the decade-long love-in that was - so far as it can be remembered - California in the 1960s.

This is a wilfully elegiac film, at once a requiem for a dream and an encapsulation of what it means to be young. Personally, I felt a little too long in the tooth to quite buy the ultimate significance of the Parsons-Kaufman pact, but the young person I saw the film with - my 11-year-old daughter Maddie - got it entirely. It was nice to take her to see a depiction of the 1960s that wasn't groaning with sex and drugs, while even the rock 'n' roll wasn't surplus to requirements.

Sure, Kaufman swigs the obligatory bottle of Jack Daniel's, while his hippy confrère, Larry, is actually in drug withdrawal, but the accent of the film is on the comedown from an era, rather than its giddy high. Even the pursuing girlfriends (Laura snags in Kaufman's reluctant squeeze, played by Marley Shelton), keep their togs on, and the

denouement - when it comes - is a medium-to-moving affirmation of personal responsibility, rather than a hymn to its abandonment.