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'A Prairie Home Companion' has plenty to offer

There is something so natural about a movie matchup between folksy radio host Garrison Keillor and that wily old film director, Robert Altman. In their individual spheres of entertainment, they each seem to be making it all up as they go along, though it takes a great deal of advance planning to create something so seemingly spontaneous.

Picturehouse 'A Prairie Home Companion' B+ The verdict: A fortuitous collaboration between Keillor and Altman in a fictional version of the former's radio hijinks. Director: Robert Altman Starring: Garrison Keillor, Tommy Lee Jones, Kevin Kline, Lily Tomlin, Meryl Streep, Woody Harrelson, Lindsay Lohan Run time: 105 minutes Release date: June 9, 2006 Rating: PG-13 for risqué humor. See showtimes On the web Official movie site View the trailer    Trailers require Quicktime [an error occurred while processing this directive]

We will never know how much of A Prairie Home Companion — their easygoing collaboration about the fictional final broadcast of a certain St. Paul radio variety show — was invented on the spot. But the film feels so organic, even as it drifts into broadly comic territory, that it seems a shame that these two veteran icons have not worked together until now.

On one level, the movie is simply a concert version of a typical Prairie Home episode, albeit one that features the likes of Meryl Streep, Lily Tomlin, John C. Reilly and Woody Harrelson as its performers. But as Edward Lachman's camera meanders backstage at the venerable Fitzgerald Theater, as we become involved in the soap-opera lives of these folks, and as the film begins straying from reality with the arrival of an angel ominously identified as Dangerous Woman, we are unquestionably in Altman territory.

Substitute the world of film for radio, and you'd have Altman's The Player. Or fashion (Ready-to-Wear) or dance (The Company). Although he works with many different screenwriters, Altman manages to put his indelible stamp on each of his films, juggling large casts of characters and multiple storylines, often with the aural overlap of the real world. So it is with A Prairie Home Companion, penned by Keillor, who certainly knows the subject matter as well as anyone.

As the radio host, simply known as G.K., Keillor is eminently laid-back, either indifferent to the demise of his program or simply unwilling to show any outward manifestations of melancholy. Keeping him on track, if not on schedule, is his efficient, pregnant stage manager Molly (Maya Rudolph), who knows how to manipulate him for the good of the broadcast.

G.K.'s once celebrated headliners are singing sisters Yolanda and Rhonda Johnson (Streep and Tomlin), the two surviving members of a family quintet. As unlikely as their pairing is, they talk with an intertwined speech pattern that completely convinces us they have been together since birth, and they harmonize with gusto. Hovering about is Yolanda's suicide-obsessed daughter Lola (Lindsay Lohan), a character that feels written in for the sake of trying to attract a younger audience or perhaps because Lohan expressed an interest in working with Altman. Whichever it is, neither director nor writer figured out what to do with her.

Reilly and Harrelson play Lefty and Dusty, faux-cowboy troubadours with a weakness for lame jokes and off-color lyrics. Kevin Kline wears the role of Prairie Home's resident private detective Guy Noir quite nattily, here redefined as the show's security guard and narrator, presumably showing off whatever slapstick bumbling did not fit in The Pink Panther. It is Noir who first encounters the angel (Virginia Madsen), an ethereal beauty who turns out to be a second cousin to The Grim Reaper, the movie's only suggestion of darkness.

The worst that could be said about A Prairie Home Companion is that it is inconsequential. But the movie so compensates by being diverting that the need to add up to something — an expectation that Altman has been avoiding for most of his career — seems beside the point.