‘Sound of Noise’ a fresh, truly funny cop comedy

“Sound of Noise,” a comedy from Sweden, is as fresh and welcome as the first hyacinth of spring.

It’s also a lot more rare: a truly original comedy that is so confident of what it’s doing that I can’t think of a single movie to compare it to. The main character is a cop named Amadeus, a tone-deaf man who has never fit in among the musically gifted members of his family (mostly, he doesn’t fit in because they constantly remind him he doesn’t). Ironically, Amadeus spends the movie on the trail of a marauding band of guerrilla percussionists, who perform elaborate, vaguely criminal acts of random music and who accidentally leave a distinctive metronome at the scene of one of their performances.

“Sound of Noise” gets momentum from the investigation, with Amadeus gradually getting closer to a solution to the mystery, and from our realization that Amadeus is finding himself attracted to a woman we know is one of the rogue drummers. It gets most of its humor from its expert timing and its outrageous situations, which include a performance that involves kidnapping a man who is awaiting surgery and then drumming on his body while he’s sedated.

That sounds dangerous. Heck, that is dangerous. But there’s a playful, fantasy quality to “Sound of Noise” that helps it get away with outlandish stuff. The drummers seem less like criminals than goofball anarchists, taunting Amadeus as they lead him on a trail of clues. And Amadeus, spurred on by the tick-tick-ticking of the metronome (he brings it to his home, where it becomes a Poe-like tell-tale heart) is so serious as he pursues the drummers that we can only laugh at his determination.

Eventually, Amadeus cracks the case, but that’s less important than the magical, romantic ending writer/directors Ola Simonsson and Johannes Stjarne Nilsson have concocted for him. Even the crazy, Blue Man Group-like percussion performances are delightful in “Sound of Noise,” a buoyant comedy that never hits a wrong note.