They didn’t have a member die in a plane crash or overdose on drugs, so the backstage saga of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons mostly remained out of the public eye. Until, of course, the 2005 Broadway smash Jersey Boys, a still-running musical that revealed a few genuinely colorful tales lurking in the backstory of the falsetto-driven vocal group. That property comes to the screen under the calm guidance of director Clint Eastwood—and though more a jazz man, he appears to have responded to the late-’50s/early-’60s period and the ironies beneath this success story.
Turns out the original members of the Four Seasons emerged from a milieu not far removed from the wiseguy world of GoodFellas—a comparison that becomes delightfully concrete in one of the story’s revelations.