Kevin Kline (as Sam Harris), Morgan Freeman (as Archie Clayton), Robert De Niro (as Paddy Connors), and Michael Douglas (as Billy Gherson). Photo by CBS/Chuck Zlotnick.

I give any movie extra points for using Earth Wind and Fire’s 1978 hit “September.” In the case of the aging actors who populate director Jon Turteltaub’s Last Vegas, the melancholy jam is more than just an excuse to dance. Last Vegas uses the tits and tropes (if not the gross-out humor) of modern comedy to deliver somber observations about the passing of time as interpreted by a Golden Boys set of seasoned actors. The resonance you get out of the movie may depend on how familiar you are with the actor’s resumes and how old you are. It does not seem like art. But if you get more out of it the more you bring to it, then who’s to say it’s not art after all?

The song and the movie begin with reminiscence: “Do you remember?” It’s a cute if not exactly believable set-up. We meet the Flatbush Four in the 1950s, looking out for each other at a Brooklyn soda fountain and posing for photo booth pictures before running off with a bottle of scotch.

It’s not Mean Streets. The assembled actors have enough screen time among them that I would have loved to see a director pull off something like The Limey. Steven Soderbergh’s 1999 film used Ken Loach’s 1967 film Poor Cow as a jumping off point to follow the Terrence Stamp character two decades later.

Future generations of appropriation-based filmmakers may string together narratives from an actor’s career to forge a new narrative. Last Vegas is not that movie, of course, but it’s not just an august Hangover movie either. Flash-forward 58 years later from juvenile hijinks to Sam (Kevin Kline) in an elder jazzercise class, Archie (Morgan Freeman) and Paddy (Robert DeNiro) living alone, and hotshot Billy (Michael Douglas) proposing to his 31-year-old girlfriend at a funeral.

It is a curious funeral. An old man dies, but where are the young to mourn him? There are maybe two people under fifty in sight; this was a man who not only didn’t have kids, but didn’t have underlings who respected him. We are also expected to believe that the Flatbush Four saved photo booth images taken on that fateful day that opened the film. I’m not even sure where I kept photo booth frames I took five years ago. Along with turntables and vinyl, and televisions with VHS-players built in, this is the analog detritus of men who serve as the meticulous archivists of their own pasts.

Mary Steenburgen (as Diana Boyle). Photo by CBS/Chuck Zlotnick.

Billy gets the old gang together in a sequence not unlike that for The World’s End, which wore its Oh My God I’m Getting Old resonances on its sleeve in a different way (young people! They’re aliens!) than Last Vegas does. Which maybe does something self-reflexive after all. Michael Douglas’s most notable recent performance was as Liberace’ in Steven Soderbergh’s swansong, Behind the Candelabra. You’d think Michael Douglas would have a ball playing the sequined West Allis export, but he’s having much more fun here and is forced to come to terms with his choice of young lover in a way that he didn’t come to terms with young Matt Damon.

So the elder Flatbush Four head to Vegas to give Billy a bachelor party he’ll never forget, and they all fall for lounge singer Diana (Mary Steenburgen), and as I said it’s a predictable affair but the actors make it watchable. And underneath the superficial glitz of Vegas is an undercurrent of life passing by. I wish the filmmakers had done more with the passage of old Las Vegas; it’s only hinted at in a scene where Billy and Diana walk among what remains of the Stardust and other defunct casinos at the Neon Museum.

Which is why the movie brings bittersweet beats out of Earth, Wind and Fire. It begins “Do you remember the 21st night of September?” It’s an autumnal memory celebrated by actors who are close to the December of their years. Last Vegas is no World’s End, but maybe it’s just because I’m not in the right demographic yet. Still, I laughed and I cried, and I want to listen to Earth, Wind and Fire.

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Last Vegas
Directed by Jon Turteltaub
Written by Dan Fogelman
With Michael Douglas, Robert DeNiro, Morgan Freeman, Kevin Kline, Mary Steenburgen
Rated PG-13 for sexual content and language
Opens today at a multiplex near you.