Here’s a complaint you will probably never again hear me level at a movie: The problem with Leatherheads is that there isn’t nearly enough football in it. This comedy is being promoted with a poster that had me looking forward to it: A football team of the 1920s huddles together gazing fearfully at the camera. What are they afraid of? Presumably a more ferocious opponent. And with good reason: Their vintage uniforms and leather helmets are clearly ill able to prevent grievous bodily injury. Star George Clooney is one of those faces, and he’s well-suited to comedies. Like Cary Grant, he’s so preposterously good-looking that you want to be able to laugh at him.

It’s funny, watching Martin Scorsese fussing over things like set lists. The great director isn’t new to concert movies, having made one of the best ones ever in The Last Waltz, which documented the final concert by The Band at the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco in 1976. In that film, performance footage is interspersed with intimate interviews with the musicians, and the evocative venue itself becomes like a character in the story.