The crowd-pleasing documentary "Young@Heart" is joyous and life-affirming and more than a little dull.

It is a feel-good movie that is, frankly, made fairly terribly.

It cries out for the services of a good editor, or a competent editor, or even a bad editor, if he could cut it down from its gaseously bloated hour and three quarters and turn it into what it should be: an hourlong documentary for the BBC.

Or, better still, throw in some commercials and knock it down to a crisp 48 minutes.

But writer, director and all-too-prominent-narrator Stephen Walker simply could not pull himself away from the allure of his subject. For here, in the form of the Young@Heart Chorus, is a moviemaker's dream: 25 or so of the most vibrant octogenarians you'll ever meet, each splashing over with the untamed force of life.

It's like the Ruth Gordon part in "Harold and Maude," times 25. And not only are these spirited seniors spilling over with life, they sing rock'n' roll. On stage. On overseas tours. Before wildly cheering crowds.

The whole idea is irresistible. This ailing and arthritic group, with an average age of 80, gives its own versions of rock songs ranging from James Brown's "I Got You (I Feel Good)" to, bizarrely, Sonic Youth's "Schizophrenia."

Charmingly, they don't always get it right -- the 92-year-old lead singer on the punk anthem "Should I Stay or Should I Go?" thinks it's by a band called The Crash.

With one exception, none of them can sing, which permanently relegates them to the realm of novelty groups. But everyone loves to see very young children acting older than their ages, and very old adults acting younger than theirs.

The fascination with older people being so spry, for those who are younger than they, is we hope we will be like that when we are that age. The fascination for people who are also that age is that they hope they are just like them.

Even so, you can't watch "Young@Heart" without bristling at the movie's inherent condescension. Here are these quaint old folks who are still active and sharp, it tells us. Aren't they precious?

It's enough to make you gag, and at times you do, but what the singers have going for them is a sense of humor. The ones that Walker's cheap camera focuses on most frequently tend to be wickedly funny, and we enjoy the time we spend with them.

If only we didn't spend so much of it. Walker pads his film with far too much rehearsal footage -- never the most fascinating of topics -- and especially with shots of cars on the road as a buffer between more important scenes.

Unless you've never seen a car on the road before, these ridiculously overused shots repeatedly slow the momentum to a crawl.

And then Walker takes up more time with a series of ill-conceived music videos, and even more by talking about himself -- where he is going, whom he is meeting and how he feels. We don't care about any of it.

But we do come to care about some of the singers. When they perform "Forever Young" at a prison, getting some of the convicts visibly teary-eyed, you can't help but watch it with awe.