A MIGHTY WIND blew thru in 2003, directed by Christopher Guest, who once again co-wrote a slice-of-Americana parody piece with Eugene Levy, stacking the cast with improv aces familiar from previous Guest-starring gigs. Clever, charming and even somewhat bittersweet and touching, their humor-spun hootenanny was the year’s #111 in earnings, with $18,750,000  banishing a $6,000,000 cost. Good fun.

“Terry and I worship an unconventional deity. The power of another dimension. Now you are not going to read about this dimension in a book or a magazine because it exists nowhere… but in my own mind.”

When a legendary folk music impresario passes away, his sons and daughter, normally at odds, agree to memorialize him with a concert, bringing three once-famed acts back together and out of the ‘Where’d They Go?’ file. Back from oblivion—and obliviousness—come ‘The Folksmen Trio’ (Guest, Michael McKean and Harry Shearer), ‘The New Main Street Singers’ (led by John Michael Higgins, Jane Lynch and Parker Posey) and the ethereal duet ‘Mitch & Mickey’ (Levy and Catherine O’Hara) whose breakup left Mitch a lost-in-his-own-space wanderer. Spirit, Music & Love ride again in one glorious sally against Time, Hurt and Irrelevance.

It’s helped immeasurably by the cast’s skills not just as actors and comedians but as musicians, playing catchy thematically-perfect tunes they mostly wrote themselves. Audiences old enough to recall the early 1960’s, not only ‘get’ the joke but grok that the goody-2-shoes New Main Street Singers were spun off the squeaky clean The New Christy Minstrels (yawn), The Folksmen Trio from the great The Kingston Trio (yay!) and we’re guessing Mitch & Mickey maybe suggest the vaunted Peter, Paul and Mary. Key is that the whipsmart actors and new- retro songs don’t make fun of their bygone inspirations, they have fun with them. While there are plenty of laughs and smiles to be savored—sly Jane Lynch takes top honors—in the (appropriately gentle) 92 minutes there’s also a notable harvest of emotion at the finish: the plaintive sweetness of Mitch & Mickey’s “A Kiss At The End Of The Rainbow” touches the vital yearning gene that may have been badly bruised or even banished (written by McKean and his wife, actress Annette O’Toole, it drew an Oscar nomination), and the title song, surged at the end by the whole gang, resonates with the call to Hope that was in the air once upon a New Frontier.

With Bob Balaban (fretting on demand), Fred Willard (pushing the obnoxious button a mite hard this time), Ed Begley Jr., Michael Hitchcock, Jennifer Coolidge (all she has to do is show up and you’re suddenly happier), Don Lake, Deborah Theaker, Larry Miller, Paul Dooley, Paul Benedict, Mary Gross. 92 minutes that could make a double-bill with the Coen Brothers prickly folk-loring Inside Llewyn Davis. Just watch this one after that one.