Grand Theft Parsons

Top it off with a cameo by the real-life Phil Kaufman, and you've got a rock'n'roll road movie like no other. Wherever he is, Gram should get a kick out of it.

Gram Parsons' last rites were among the most extra­ordinary in rock history. Too bad this retelling of the singer's final adventure is so tame.

What could have served as a colorful episode in a more expansive film about the famed singer has instead become the premise of a mildly entertaining but overextended road movie that doesn't succeed on either dramatic or comedic terms.

Knoxville is surprisingly good playing a man who may have been in one too many barroom brawls, moving with a hunched, hips-forward swagger that suggests someone constantly walking through very low doorways.

Neither a satisfying exploration of ’70s culture, nor a madcap "Weekend at Bernie’s" caper, nor an informative paean to Parsons's legacy, Grand Theft stumbles toward all three possibilities, backpedals, then stalls, left to coast as an insipid road movie.

Knoxville, in his first dramatic role, does what he can with script and direction that aggressively eschew any insight into Kaufman's grief.

Irish director David Caffrey and English screenwriter Jeremy Drysdale have, respectively, zero sense of pace and a tin-eared grasp of period speech, and together fail either to let us care about their characters or to create any sense of a living era.