Evan Rachel Wood and Jim Sturgess in "Across the Universe"

Julie Taymor, it says here on imdb.com, was born in 1952. This amazes me. I would have bet that the director of Broadway’s The Lion King and the film Titus was at least 10 years younger than that.

I say this because it’s hard for me to believe that the Beatles pastiche Across the Universe was made by anyone with any firsthand memory of the 1960s—certainly not by anyone whose adolescence coincided with the Beatles’ heyday. Despite a few flashes of wit and production pizzazz, this overwrought and underthought musical plays like an endless loop of clichés regurgitated from movies about the 1960s made in the 1970s and 1980s. (Milos Foreman’s adaptation of Hair was about the best of them, and Taymor clearly knows that one pretty well). Alternately banal and bathetic, Across the Universe actually had me thinking that maybe Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (the 1978 movie with Peter Frampton and the Bee Gees, not the album) wasn’t as bad as I remembered.

The idea, according to the press notes, was to create a musical that used Beatles songs but wasn’t about the Beatles. And so we have a story about restless youth in the 1960s, converging on New York City to escape their various dreary hometowns and finding love and rebellion, drugs and disillusionment, politics and protest, etc., etc.

You can do this with disposable pop tunes, like the ABBA musical Mamma Mia, or free-form shows that don’t try too hard to literalize the music, like Twyla Tharp’s Billy Joel musical Movin’ Out. On the other hand, look what happened when Tharp tried to do the same thing with Bob Dylan and came up with The Times They Are A-Changin’, which folded on Broadway after only 28 performances.

You just can’t invest one of these jukebox shows with too much seriousness. Performing songs anew is fine. Illustrating them is fine. Twisting them into a dramatic narrative is not fine. It either forces the songs to be something they’re not, or leads to a story that twists all over the place trying to encompass the songs.

Across the Universe is endless cross-purposes with itself. It tries to do everything I’ve suggested, and ends up doing nothing well. It isn’t about the Beatles, but can’t resist lobbing in bits of Beatle biography. It invents new meanings for so many songs that I have to wonder if Paul McCartney and Yoko Ono approved (and if they did how much they got paid).

But here’s the biggest thing it does wrong: It approaches this wonderful collection of songs (34 are used, all performed by the film’s cast) with almost no appreciation of what made them so delightful in the first place.

Taymor particularly seems deaf to the wit and sheer silliness that marked a lot of Beatles songs. She reinvents “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road” as a yelp of passion delivered by a character doing an atrocious impersonation of Janis Joplin. (The performer’s name is Dana Fuchs, which I mention only because I can’t resist saying—though not without good reason—that she is fuching awful.)

Across the Universe is thin on celebrity guest stars, which is a relief given how poorly those who were roped in acquit themselves. Bono is unfortunately still recognizable as a Dennis Hopper/Easy Rider/Timothy Leary amalgam singing a version of “I Am the Walrus” that incorporates every psychedelic possible cliché (and that’s a lot of clichés). And its embarrassing to see poor Eddie Izzard stumbling with forgivable confusion through “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite.”

It’s only worse when Taymor tries to get serious. She stages “I Want You,” another song whose lyric was only meant to provide vocalizing over a heavy riff, as a thunderingly obvious antiwar number with cribs from the film of Pink Floyd The Wall. This climaxes in a visual metaphor so heavyhanded (draftees carrying a model of the Statue of Liberty through a miniature set of Vietnam, staggering under its weight) that it makes you long for the relative sophistication of your average suburban flower child. Only Joe Cocker has anything to add, with a too-brief performance of “Come Together.”

The best I can say for Across the Universe is that it’s not wholly without its moments of inspiration: There simply aren’t enough of them to get you through two and one quarter hours of dreariness and pomposity. I would advise you to save your ticket money and rent or buy a copy of the animated classic Yellow Submarine instead, but it’s pretty hard to find. You should be able to find Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, though. Even better, just buy a couple of Beatles CDs.