By Clint Morris

If you can swallow Ron Livingston playing a twenty-year old – something he hasn’t been for over twenty years – you can easily digest “Music Within”, a preachy but worthwhile flick about the chap behind the disability-rights movement, Richard Pimentel.

Livingston, who you either know as the slacker Peter from “Office Space” (1998) or as ‘Burger’ on TVs “Sex & The City”, gives a commendable performance as – someone twice his age; OK, that’s the last time I’ll mention the age difference between actor and character. Promise. Still, I can’t figure it out why they went with him – a young man, a pro speaker, who gets rejected from a school because he hasn’t “lived” enough. He’s told to return when his opinion is worth something.

Live he does. Pimentel returns from a tour of duty in Vietnam, his hearing severely impaired and finds true purpose and meaning in his life working on behalf of Americans with disabilities.

Though at times director Steven Sawalich’s film shifts from comedy to drama and back to comedy again a tad uneasily, there’s a good film here – not a great film, but a good film. It’s got some important messages in it, some divine performances (Michael Sheen, of “Underworld” fame, gives an amazing performance as a man with Cerebral Palsy, Melissa George plays Pimentel’s swinging lover, and it’s nice to see Leslie Nielsen in a ‘straight’ role again; here playing a doctor) and, in my opinion, best of all, the best 60s and 70s rock soundtrack since “Forrest Gump” (and you wouldn’t believe it – there’s no CD soundtrack available for it!).

“Music Within” plays a bit like an excessively earnest public-service announcement, but that’s not always a bad thing – at least this way the message gets through.

DVD EXTRAS
A heap of good extras on the DVD, including an audio commentary, deleted scenes, numerous featurettes, a bit of footage of Pimentel giving a speech, and some trailers.