‘Florence Foster Jenkins’ proves bad singing makes a good movie

“How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice!’’ goes the old joke. But in Stephen Frears’ delightful, semicomedic biopic “Florence Foster Jenkins,’’ all the eccentric heiress/pꦓhilanthropist of the title needed to do to make her public singing debut at the legendary venue in 1944 was purchase 1,000 tickets.

Florence’s common-law husband St. Clair Bayfield — w🍬ho’s spent decades protecting the soprano who would go down in history as the worst singer ever from what he calls “the mockers and the scoffers’’ — warns her that the strain might kill the 76-year-old div🍷a.

“Then I shall die happy!’’ exclaims the irrepressible Florence,𓄧 unforgettably portrayed by Meryl Streep — who will surely receive her 20th Oscar nomination for her fearless work in this bizarre, mostly true story.

Hugh Grant is no less great (and has terrific chemistry with Streep) in his juiciest role in years as St. Clair. A mildly roguish minor Shakespearean actor, his duties as her utterly devoted spouse include paying off music critics at h꧂er private recitals to provide rave notices for her off-key, off-pitch vocals, which sound like she’s being strangled.

St. Clair actually lives with his long-suffering English mistress (Rebecca Ferguson) in an apartment paid for by Florence. As Florence poignantly explains, the🦋ir marriage was never consummated because she contracted syphilis from her first husband on their wedding night 50 years earlier, leaving her bald — and something of a medical miracle for surviving into🍎 old age.

Despite Streep’s bravura dramatic flourishes, “Florence Foster Jenkins’’ is a mostly a merry farce,🌺 as Florence’s new piano accompanist Cosme McMoon (a very funny Simon Helberg of TV’s “The Big Bang Theory,’’ who is also a whiz at the keyboard in real life) is plunged into her and St. Clair’s dizzyingly delusional orbit.

Cosme quickly realizes that the Carnegꦿi🅺e Hall concert is a looming disaster that even St. Clair can’t finesse — especially when the World War II veterans to whom Florence has donated tickets initially greet her squawks with derisive laughter and jeers.

That’s where this crowd-pleasing movie’s other great performer comes in — Broadway’s Nina Arianda as a tycoon’s leather-lunged new wife, who gives an impromptu etiquette lesson in the huge concert hall. But can St. Clair protect his sweetly naive wife from a dose of reality admin꧋istered by New York Post columnist Earl Wilson (Christian McKay)?

Though filmed mostly in London and Liverpool, England, “Florence Foster Jenkins’’ gives a vivid sense of wartime New York thanks to English master director Frears, who has worked on both sides of the Atlantic for decades in film🌟s as varied ꩵas “The Queen’’ and “High Fidelity.’’

With such a high-powered cast at his disposal, Fre🎉ars’ latest is probably the most fun you’ll have at a movie this summer.