Music Within is based on a worthy true story, but it’s not one that necessarily leaps off the page: Richard Pimentel rose from a hard-luck childhood, barely survived a tour in Vietnam (where he lost most of his hearing) and went on in the 1980s to become a lobbyist for Americans with disabilities. Central to his success were his talents as a public speaker, which he discovered at an early age and took the ‘60s and ‘70s to master amid his travails.

Or that’s the way Music Within tells it. What’s curious is that while suggesting Pimentel’s fascination with speech-making — along with his empathy for outsiders and, following his injury in ’Nam, the handicapped — was his raison d’être, the film loses its way somewhere during the Age of Aquarius, with all its broadly painted clichés. This is one of those movies that introduces the Vietnam hitch with helicopters and The Animals’ “We Gotta Get Out of This Place.” Back in the States, the appearance of VW microbuses and longhairs in granny glasses announces that flower power is in bloom. It later plunks its hero down in a Berkeley bar where a female-fronted band in hippie costumes is miming Jefferson Airplane’s “Somebody to Love.” And this is supposed to be 1972. Why didn’t they throw in The Beatles at Shea Stadium while they were at it?
There’s not much else to do with Music Within but nitpick, lest one become too infuriated by the squandered talents of Ron Livingston — usually adept at playing a charming and understated Everyman — as Pimentel and Michael Sheen (The Queen), who punches at My Left Foot weight as Pimentel’s best friend, a genius with cerebral palsy.