Parky at the Pictures (DVD 8/8/2013)

Already tense because she has been tipped off that a plain-clothes inspector is in the vicinity, manager Ann Dowd is furious to learn that the freezer door has been left open overnight and the entire stock of bacon and pickles at her ChickWich fast-food restaurant in suburban Ohio has been ruined. In no mood for any more screw-ups, she gives her staff a pep talk before Friday opening. She is convinced that cocky twentysomething Philip Ettinger is to blame and confides her suspicions to deputy Ashlie Atkinson before lightening up to break the news that she has become engaged to trucker Bill Camp.

Feeling pleased with herself for revealing that she sends Camp the odd saucy sext, Dowd is caught off-guard when a phone call comes through from a man claiming to be a police officer (Pat Healy) investigating a complaint that cashier Dreama Walker stole money from a customer's purse. Too shocked to check the caller's credentials and stung by Walker's earlier backchat on being ticked off for tardiness, Dowd has the 19 year-old blonde brought to the back office. Reassuring Dowd that area manager Matt Skibiak is with him (although she doesn't think to ask to speak to him), Healy orders her to search Walker pockets and bag. When no money is found, Dowd wants to ring off and get back to work. But Healy tells her that Walker's brother is involved in a major crime and that her house is currently being searched.

Intimidated by the gravity of Healy's tone and the severity of the situation, Dowd feels she has no option when he orders her to conduct a strip search. She asks Atkinson to be a witness and persuades Walker that it would be better to undergo such a procedure in private with friends than in a prison cell. Covering Walker with an apron, Dowd puts her clothes in a plastic bag and, following Healy's instructions, places them on the front seat of her own vehicle in the car park so they can be collected without drawing customer attention to the scandal.

Seeing how busy the restaurant is getting, Dowd asks Healy if it would be okay to assist the overwhelmed Nikiya Mathis, Amelia Fowler and Ralph Rodriguez. He suggests a male employee is placed in charge of Walker to prevent her from trying to escape and Dowd selects Ettinger. As she explains what is happening, we see that Healy is not a cop after all, but a middle-aged man making a sandwich in the kitchen of his comfortable home. However, he nearly blows his sadistic prank when Ettinger refuses to co-operate and gives him a mouthful of abuse down the line. He momentarily struggles to convince Dowd how important it is that she takes the incident seriously, but she eventually asks the newly arrived Camp to guard Walker.

Camp is also dubious at first when Healy says that he is convinced Walker is hiding the money inside her body. However, he is reluctant to jeopardise his fiancée's position. So, when Healy order him to remove the apron and conduct a fresh search, Camp complies and Walker allows him to touch her when Healy again threatens her with jail time. Outside, however, Ettinger has discovered that Walker's brother is out of town and that there is no raid going on at the family home. But Dowd insists she will follow procedures and tells Ettinger to mind his own business.

Back in the office, Healy has coerced Camp into making the naked Walker do jumping jacks so that any contraband will fall to the floor. But, as he is enjoying his perverse moment of triumph, the credits on his phone elapse and he has to dash in from the garden to his study in order to top them up before the line goes dead. Camp is too perplexed to notice the sudden change in tone and accedes when Healy directs him to spank Walker across his knee for being so disrespectful to Dowd. He also follows orders when Healy tells him to demand fellatio, but hurries out of the room in evident distress when Dowd returns to see how he is getting on.

While Camp scurries out to his van to phone a pal and confess to doing something stupid, Dowd asks grizzled day shifter Stephen Payne to watch over Walker. He refuses and questions why Dowd has been taking orders from a stranger without making any effort to verify his identity. On hearing the commotion, Healy hangs up and welcomes his young daughter home from school, while the real cops arrive at the ChickWich after Dowd discovers that Skibiak had been off sick all day and that no charge had been filed against Walker.

Having kept such a tight rein on the action up to this point, Zobel slackens off in a superfluous coda. The closing caption stating that over 70 similar hoaxes were perpetuated over a decade in 30 other states would have sufficed. But Zobel goes on to show how Healy is tracked down and arrested, how Walker sues the company rather than Dowd and how she attempts to justify her actions on the chat show circuit after breaking up with Camp. Nevertheless, with Adam Stone making unsettling use of close-ups and subtle camera movements within the confined spaces, this remains a gripping and deeply disconcerting reaffirmation of Stanley Milgram's 1960s experiments into why rational individuals under duress will do whatever they are told by a presumed authority figure.

There is no question that many will accuse Zobel of sensationalism and sexual exploitation in recouting an incident that occurred at a McDonald's in Mount Washington, Kentucky in April 2004. But, even though Heather McIntosh's ominous cello score is occasionally a little manipulative, Zobel's approach is laudably restrained, given the current vogue in indie horror for insisting that less is more, but even more is better. Instead, he concentrates on getting the burger bar atmosphere right, coaxing exemplarily naturalistic performances out of a fine cast and on showing how Healy employs a combination of rigidity and flattery to cajole Dowd and her cohorts into doing his bidding. Moreover, he also succeeds in implicating the viewer in Walker's humiliation. What is missing, however, is a motive for Healy's predatory crime. Thus, while this intense tale is often plausible and suspenseful in exploring where compliance becomes complicity, it is never quite as psychologically incisive as it might be.

The actions of American in Paris Bradley Corbet are equally hard to condone in Antonio Campos's Simon Killer. Allegedly inspired by the writings of Georges Simenon, but owing plenty to Patricia Highsmith's Ripley novels, this appears to follow Campos's feature bow, Afterschool (2008), in indicting the malevolent influence of the Internet on modern male impressions of the opposite sex. However, as with Sean Durkin's Martha Marcy May Marlene (2011), which Campos produced, this is more a story about the difficulties people face in overcoming emotional trauma and the ruinous decisions that they sometimes make when not in complete control.

Having just broken up with his five-year girlfriend, twentysomething Brady Corbet arrives in France to stay with his cousin, Nicolas Ronchi. Left to his own devices for a few days, Corbet wanders around the capital's landmarks and galleries by day and its bars by night. However, he has no luck in picking up girls, although he does chat briefly to Constance Rousseau and Lila Salet on the Métro after he is harangued by Cambodian Etienne Rotha Moeng for bumping into him in the street. Following an unsatisfying sex line encounter and an even less enjoyable conversation with mother Alexandra Neil, Corbet allows himself to be shepherded into a Pigalle bar by doorman Yannis Calonnec. He pays for sex with African hostess Mati Diop, who breaks the rules by giving him her number in case he wants a private session.

Upset at receiving an email from his ex saying she wants nothing more to do with him because he has changed beyond all recognition, Corbet calls Diop for a paid date in her apartment. However, when he gets beaten up while trying to stop a mugging at the Gare du Nord, Diop reluctantly allows him to stay with her while he makes alternative arrangements. As they lie in bed together, she tells him about the violent husband who abused her while she was having a miscarriage and Corbet (who only has schoolboy French) misunderstands and thinks she works as a prostitute to raise her son.

Lying to Neil that he has gone to Prague and is focused on finding something worthwhile to do with his neuroscience degree, Corbet enjoys lots of sex, drugs and rock`n'roll with Diop, who is taken by the awkward charm he exudes while dancing inexpertly in a nightclub. After a couple of days, he suggests that she should film her clients and blackmail them so she wouldn't have to work so hard. However, when they try fleecing Michaël Abiteboul, he turns out to be a cop and Corbet only just evades his clutches having followed him home to make a doorstep proposition.

They have more luck with guilty husband Souleymane Dicko, who watches laptop footage of his infidelity with deep shame, as Corbet and Diop celebrate their imminent payday with energetic sex. Soon afterwards, however, Corbet runs into Rouseau who remembers him from the train and tells him about her literature course over coffee. But, on getting home, he finds Diop has been badly beaten by Abiteboul and gives her the fox lapel pin he has had since childhood to cheer her up.

His concern doesn't stop him from meeting Rousseau, however, and they kiss in a club, where again his ungainly dancing style proves irresistible. He keeps trying to contact Solo to arrange a cash collection, but he receives no reply until the following day, when the victim's wife calls to ask Corbet why has been pestering her husband and if he can explain why he has suddenly disappeared. Realising he could be in big trouble, Corbet runs out on Rousseau and hurries home to Diop to urge her to move out as quickly as possible. She smells another woman on him, however, and brands him a coward. In a fit of pique, Corbet attacks her and leaves her in a dreadful state, as he drops the incriminating phone into a street gutter.

Needing somewhere to crash, he badgers Rousseau. But she refuses to let him stay and he drops in on Ronchi in the middle of a birthday party. He asks if he can take a shower and, suddenly remembering that he left his fox pin with Diop, he begins whimpering pathetically in fear of being apprehended. In desperation, Corbet sends his ex a message begging her to take him back and insisting that he has changed. He has a nervous moment at the airport, as his visa has expired. But he is allowed to depart and seems to escape becoming the killer of the film title, as Diop joltingly regains consciousness.

Playing on the image created in such pictures as Michael Haneke's Funny Games US (2007), Lars von Trier's Melancholia and Martha Marcy May Marlene (both 2011), 23 year-old Brady Corbet delivers another chilling display of seething sociopathy in this gripping, if not entirely convincing thriller. But, for all the confused amorality and exploitative opportunism, it isn't entirely clear what Campos is trying to say about his protagonist or the society that spawned him. Much of this has to do with the opacity of the narrative, which denies the viewer any tangible backstory to explain Corbet's mindset. But the plotting often feels haphazardly extemporised and too many of the secondary characters, including Rousseau, Abiteboul and Dicko (who is better known in France as the rapper, Solo), seem to exist solely to complicate the sleepwalking Corbet's nightmarish progress.

Conspiring with cinematographer Joe Anderson to disconcert the audience with some chicly eccentric framing choices and lengthy Dardenne-like takes, Campos uses the percussive score by Daniel Bensi and Saunder Jurriaans and the driving techno-rock songtrack to give the action plenty of audiovisual punch. He also concocts a supremely disorientating transition style that eschews plain cuts, fades or dissolves to fill the screen with scrawls of colour that almost convey the blurring of Corbet's sense of right and wrong. But the moral ambivalence ultimately proves as problematic as the sexual explicitness and the bleak wit, which too often feel self-consciously contrived rather than intrinsic to either the sordid drama or the disturbed individual at its black heart.

Although it's ostensibly a drama, Travis Mathews's debut feature, I Want Your Love, feels much more like a fly-on-the-wall documentary. Arriving here on a limited engagement after it caused something of a furore in Australia when it was denied a certificate on the grounds that its unsimulated sex scenes were insufficiently germane to the narrative to prevent them from being branded pornographic, this follows in the footsteps of Andrew Haigh's Weekend (2011) and David Lambert's Beyond the Walls (2012) in playing down the `gay' aspect of the same-sex scenario and treating the characters as human beings with universal hopes, fears, desires and insecurities. However, the standard of the acting is disappointingly low, while the absence of a tangible plot leaves this relying heavily on bedroom sequences that staunchly eschew eroticism, but leave far too little to the imagination and offer few, if any, genuine character insights.

Having failed to make it as a performance artist in San Francisco, thirtysomething Jesse Metzger has decided to return to Ohio and see if he can carve a niche in his notoriously conservative home state. Flatmate Wayne Bumb has invited some of their usual crowd to spend a last evening together before the big farewell party planned for the following night. However, Metzger is in no mood for the prattle of African-American shop clerk Brontez Purnell, Bumb's flirtation with boyfriend Ferrin Solano or the waspish interjections of the sole women in the group, Shannon O'Malley and Courtney Trouble. So, he slips away to see older neighbour Keith McDonald, a more successful artist who has been something of a mentor and is not entirely convinced that Metzger is doing the right thing for the right reasons, as he is hoping to pay off some of his debts by living rent free with his parents.

Left to mooch the streets alone after failing to lure McDonald into a bar, Metzger sleeps late and spends his last day in the city wondering whether he is making a mistake. He knows part of the problem lies with his ex-boyfriend, Ben Jasper, and they have a pleasant afternoon together that serves only to further cloud Metzger's thinking. However, while out jogging, he gets a phone message from his father (Bob Mathews), in which he states that he won't allow him to sponge off him once he's back and a rather shell-shocked Metzger decides to give his party a miss and hide out in McDonald's apartment while he is out of town.

Downstairs, things are beginning to liven up. Purnell makes a less than subtle play for Jasper, while Bumb (who has been having second thoughts about asking Solano to move in with him) finds himself part of a threesome with Jorge Rodolfo. Tentative kisses lead to shirts being discarded and armpits being licked. But the emphasis is soon on graphic sexual encounters that are photographed and edited to stress the urgency of the lust, but also the lack of gymnastic posturing that one associates with pornography. Moreover, once Rodolfo takes himself off to the dance floor, both couplings become acts of love-making rather than pure gratification and this is why Metzger's tryst with the unexpectedly returned McDonald ends prematurely, as he realises it is not what he wants.

The picture ends with Jasper driving Metzger to the airport and the latter getting the giggles, as it has dawned on him that he is actually excited about going home. Quite whether this counts as a happy ending is by the by and few viewers will be particularly bothered what happens to any of the characters, who are too sketchily drawn to be worthy of much emotional investment. But, apart from a couple of mentions of condoms, Mathews skirts such Queer Cinema clichés as coming out, safe sex and being part of the scene to present a bunch of friends living their lives and making the best of our recessional times. His dialogue might not be up to much and he clearly doesn't set much store by slick performance. But he and Bryan Darling do a decent job of editing Keith Wilson's grainy, tightly framed and often handheld imagery and convey something of the skittishness of the social circle and the frisson of the copulation sequences.

While this may not shatter any taboos or establish any new benchmarks, it makes for more consistently enticing viewing than Mathews and Hollywood buddy James Franco's Interior: Leather Bar, a rather self-conscious actorly piece that takes the notion that William Friedkin had to cut 40 minutes from his epochal thriller Cruising (1980) in order to get it an R certificate and encourages a group of young actors under the tutelage of a bona fide S&M master to reinvent the missing action. Pushing the players to see how far they will go in the name of art, while exploring when the graphic non-simulation of sexual acts becomes pornographic, this is an intellectually valid exercise that is made all the more fascinating by the cameoing presence of Franco, who had done something similar with the experimental Memories of Idaho (2011), which was based on scraps discarded from Gus Van Sant's My Own Private Idaho (1991). Yet, while they are both undeniably raw and edgy, what I Want Your Love and Interior: Leather Bar chiefly have in common is an air of self-satisfaction with their own perceived daring that diminishes their ability either to challenge or convince.

Crossing the Atlantic, writer-director Marcus Markou's feature debut, Papadopoulos and Sons, is a well-meaning, if formulaic migrant comedy that seeks to broker a rapprochement between the owners of a couple of Mediterranean fast-food joints on a suburban London high street. But, despite the energy of a bullish cast, this slight  recessional saga has few satirical barbs or cultural insights to offer, which is all the more disappointing as so few British films deal with the country's numerous ethnic enclaves and this could have been improved considerably with a couple more drafts of the screenplay.

European Entrepreneur of the Year Stephen Dillane is about to fulfil his dream. The plans for his shopping plaza have been approved and the banks have agreed to fund the project. But he is too preoccupied to notice the growing severity of the financial crisis and suddenly finds himself in debt to the tune of £300 million and is forced to sell the luxury home he shares with children Georgia Groome, Frank Dillane and Thomas Underhill, and loyal housekeeper Selina Cadell. Despite the efforts of priggish accountant Ed Stoppard and his more sympathetic colleague Cosima Shaw, Dillane is left with nothing but the deeds to the Greek fish-and-chip where he grew up. However, he is unable to sell this without the permission of estranged older brother George Corraface, who sees Dillane's fall from grace as a chance to rebuild some burnt bridges.

Naturally, Groome, Dillane Jr and Underhill take a shine to their roguish uncle, who refuses to sell his father's shop and persuades the sibling he brought up alone after their parents died that his best chance of getting back on his feet lies with redecorating the old place and firing up the fryers to make an honest living. Old friends Jimmy Roussounis and Vangelis Christodoulou rally to the cause and Cadell keeps the tea coming during the inevitable `turning things round' montage that shows Dillane resign himself to his situation and rise to Corraface's challenge.

The disapproval of kebab shop owner George Savvides steels Dillane's resolve and the customers soon start rolling in. He also realises that he is falling for Shaw, who has more than a merely professional interest in her client. But Dillane Jr needs a pep talk from his father to convince him that they are not doomed to a life of penury, while Groome's budding romance with Savvides's son Cesare Taurasi ramps up the tension between the rivals. However, Dillane has learnt from his experiences that cut-throat tactics are not always the best and, following an inevitable tragedy, the action closes with the kebab and chip emporia sealing a pact of peaceful co-existence with a Zorba-like dance on the pavement.

Always an engaging actor (who has a touch of Dirk Bogarde about him, if anybody is thinking of making a biopic), Dillane keeps this entirely predictable picture from collapsing under the weight of cliché, caricature and inconsequence. His romance with Shaw is wholly unconvincing, while his workaholic character's struggle to reconnect with his kids is undermined by the hesitancy of juvenile co-stars who include his own son. However, Dillane ably captures the self-protective taciturnity of a man who has been hurt by the racist taunts of his youth and the loss of his wife, while his byplay with the lustily extroverted Corraface is spikily spirited and introduces an intriguing clan/class notion that is unfortunately tackled with a similar superficiality to the other potentially interesting issues. Even the frothiest British romp in the 1950s and 60s contained a modicum of social critique and it's a shame that Markou opted to go down the sitcomedic rather than the acerbic realist route. But let's hope that he inspires film-makers from other communities to tell their own stories.

The mood is considerably lighter, as the scene shifts to the North Wales coast for Sara Sugarman's Vinyl, a music industry satire that takes its cue from the 2004 hoax that saw Mike Peters convince the British musical establishment that the band singing ’45 RPM' was The Poppyfields when, in fact, they were an unsigned combo named The Wayriders lip-synching to a track by Peters's former band, The Alarm. The ruse worked, in so far as it earned the old rockers their first hit since 1989. But fact proves much more interesting than fiction in this instance, as, for all the eagerness of a bullish cast, this is a plot heavy romp that revisits themes previously covered with scarcely greater perspicacity in Brian Gibson's Still Crazy (1998) and Peter Cattaneo's The Rocker (2008)

Washed-up punk Phil Daniels lives in a caravan in a field with long-suffering girlfriend Julia Ford, who is desperately hoping that he will grow up and get her pregnant. He pays landlady Phyllis McMahon her rent in dope and constantly thinks back to the all-too-short glory days of Johnny Jones and the Weapons of Happiness. Thus, when he learns that an old contemporary has died, he heads back to North Wales for the funeral and not only bumps into The Buzzcocks frontman Steve Diggle at the graveside, but also his onetime bandmates Keith Allen, Perry Benson and Chris Turner.

Allen has not forgiven Daniels for breaking up the band on the verge of the big time. But, following a heavy drinking session, he tags back to the mansion that Benson has bought with the profits from his care homes business and jams along on a track that they all agree sounds pretty decent when they play it back next morning. Convinced that this is their ticket back to the top, Daniels heads to London for a meeting with Justin Cartwright, who just happens to be the son of the A&R man who handled the Weapons two decades earlier. He is happy to have lunch and catch up with a childhood hero. But he tells Daniels that modern kids are into bands closer to their own age rather and reject anybody over 30, as watching them feels too much like catching their parents in flagrante.

Momentarily discouraged, Daniels hits upon the idea of crediting the track to a hot new Welsh band called The Single Shots and is delighted when `Free Rock`n'roll' starts getting radio play. His erstwhile bandmates are less than thrilled, however, when he informs them that they are going to have to give up their place in the spotlight to a stooge outfit that can lip-sync in TV studios and look good in photo shoots. Reluctantly, Allen, Benson and Turner agree to attend the auditions in a community hall and quickly whittle down the dross to Alexa Davies, Will Peters, Daniel Washington and Lewis Foxton, who can't play a note between them, but are suitably photogenic and are willing to learn.

They are also keen on busker Jamie Blackley, but Daniels takes a dislike to his cocky attitude and it is only when Allen remarks that he was just the same at that age that Daniels dashes after him. He pretends to be Blackley's dad when he is chased by copper Simon Humphrey for causing a disturbance in the shopping precinct and hires him to front the band after they get drunk in the pub. 

A musical crash course follows, as the Weapons try to teach the Shots to play their instruments. They also begin mocking up printed and online press material to give the impression that they are old school friends who have been playing together around Rhyl for years. After much rehearsal, Daniels arranges an interview with London journalist Kelly Murray and she is so impressed by Blackley's chirpy charm and his claim to be David Bowie's love child that she gives the band a big write-up and they are signed by Cartwright amidst much fanfare. .

As Allen makes wedding videos for a living, he shoots a promo for the single around the seafront and it shoots into the charts at No7. However, he also overhears Daniels and Benson chatting in the pub about the prospect that Daniels could be Blackley's real father, as his mother (Tracy Whitwell) was once a notorious groupie. Thus, while Allen convinces himself that Daniels is boosting his own son so he can rip everyone off again, Daniels breaks the news he is a father to Ford, just as she was about to tell him she is finally pregnant.

Ford throws Daniels out and he is in a daze when Allen calls a meeting to inform everyone that he has told Cartwright the truth about the song and insists that the Weapons rather than the Shots will appear in an upcoming TV slot. No sooner have they sacked Blackley and his cohorts, however, than the oldsters discover that the label is going to stick with the lie and they hastily have to reassemble the band in time for the show. 

Meanwhile, Daniels has accepted a job in one of Benson's care homes in a bid to prove to Ford that he can be a good father. However, she has paid a visit to Whitwell and found out that it is highly unlikely that he is Blackley's dad. So, she urges him to go to London with the rest of the band and seize their opportunity. But breaking into the studios proves easier said than done and the sight of Daniels being threatened by bouncers in the wings prompts Blackley to halt in mid-mime and dedicate one of his own songs to Daniels for giving him the confidence to take a tilt.

As the picture ends, Daniels and Blackley are pals again and the Shots and the Weapons top the bill at a Welsh castle gig. It's a suitably tacky end for a cornball plot that feels like something that might have served in the mid-1960s as a vehicle for the likes of Cliff Richard and The Shadow, The Dave Clark Five or Freddie and The Dreamers. Yet, with a little more thought and conviction, this could easily have been more than a slab of lightweight entertainment. Surely more could have been made of the pathetic plasticity of so much modern pop, while the cookie-cutter corporate mentality that champions it has to be ripe for lampooning.

Nevertheless, Phil Daniels gives a typically chipper performance and he is solidly supported by Blackley, Allen, Benson and Ford. Returning after an eight-year hiatus and making her first feature without a female protagonist - after Mad Cows (1999), Very Annie Mary (2001) and Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen (2004) - Sugarman also directs briskly and with an insight into the music scene derived from her own experiences. But this always feels a tad old-fashioned and, most damningly of all, the music is bloody awful.

Finally, we head back to Belfast in the 1970s for a lively biopic of maverick music maven Terri Hooley. Taking its name from the iconic record shop on Great Victoria Street that became the centre of the Ulster punk scene, Lisa Barros D'Sa and Glenn Leyburn's Good Vibrations may be set in the same period as Michael Winterbottom's 24 Hour Party People (2002) and may play equally fast and loose with the facts. But, even though Winterbottom is credited here as an executive producer, this textbook rags to more rags story is markedly less stylistically ambitious and is much more willing to excuse its anti-hero's flaws simply because of the fraught times in which he operated and the sheer magnitude of the reckless risks he took to boost bands like Rudi, The Outcasts and The Undertones.

The action opens charmingly, with young Terri Hooley (Cathal Maguire) skipping around the front garden of the family home in Belfast with Hank Williams's `I Saw the Light' playing in his head. However, this reverie is abruptly ended by a toy arrow hitting the boy in the eye and the scene shifts forwards to the 1970s - via an audiovisual montage sketching in the events that led to the Troubles - where the bearded, disaffected adult Terri (Richard Dormer) is arguing with his father (Karl Johnson), who had stood unsuccessfully as a socialist in 12 mayoral elections. Convinced that reggae can heal rifts, Terri spins discs in empty bars and only decides to change direction on meeting Ruth (Jodie Whittaker), an English student who marries him after a whirlwind courtship and gets a job as a truant office to get the £40 she thinks he needs to open a record shop.

In fact, Terri has mortgaged their home without telling her and, as we see Ruth chasing skiving kids across soulless housing estates, her husband summons the local Catholic and Protestant bully boys and uses the gems in his record collection to bribe them into leaving him and his premises alone. Following this highly specious sequence (which contains a listless cameo by Adrian Dunbar as a long-haired terrorist), the tale ticks along predictably, as Terri and Ruth rub along like eccentric soulmates, his dad stands outside the store denouncing his capitalist wickedness and his business partner David (Michael Colgan) frets about bills and the dismal turnover.

But, then, Terri and David find themselves in a crowded club where local punk band Rudi are due on stage. A couple of smug members of the Royal Ulster Constabulary wander in to check on underage drinking. But Terri stands up to them at the bar and joins in a derogatory chant led by the band, who rip into a song that causes the pogo-ing Terri to have a Damascene moment that will change Northern Irish music forever. Determined to give Rudi and The Outcasts the prominence they deserve, he convinces the barman at The Harp (Dylan Moran) to let them stage a gig and persuades a laconic studio engineer (Liam Cunningham) to record some tracks on the cheap.

Almost overnight, both bands have loyal followings in the capital. But Terri is intent on converting the masses and he bundles his charges into a battered van and soon has bashful teens in halls across the province leaping around to what he deems the antidote to the Troubles. However, it's not all plain sailing and the van is stopped by an army patrol in the middle of the night. But the best is yet to come, as the 18 year-old Fergal Sharkey (Kerr Logan) arrives on Terri's doorstep from Derry and announces that The Undertones are going to be the next big thing. On hearing `Teenage Kicks', he knows he's on to a winner and invests everything in a pressing of the single and a trip to London to start a bidding war among the A&R men.

But no one is interested and it is only by chance that he manages to get a copy to John Peel at Radio One. Even then, Terri thinks he has failed in his mission as several days go by without airplay. However, while he is sulking in the bath, Peel plays `Teenage Kicks' twice in a row and Good Vibrations appears to be on the cusp. But Sharkey's combo sign to Sire Records and Terri (who let them go for a £500 van and a signed photo of The Shangri-Las) starts drinking heavily and not only botches Rudi's big break by forgetting to get their records pressed, but also misses the birth of his daughter. Moreover, as the bills and tax demands flood in, he has to confess to Ruth that he has mortgaged their future and she leaves him. Suddenly vulnerable, he is beaten up by the sectarian skinheads who have previously been kept on a leash and seems to be washed up. But he proves as irrepressible as ever, bouncing back in 1980 with a packed fundraiser at Ulster Hall that is attended by John Peel himself, makes a loss because the guest list is too big and culminates in the Godfather of Belfast Punk winking at the ghost of Hank Williams (Peter Kelly), as he closes the show with a rendition of Sonny Bono's `Laugh At Me'.

Previously covered in Roy Wallace's 2003 short Big Time, Terri Hooley's chequered career is scarcely short of incident. However, too many of the ones selected by screenwriters Glenn Patterson and Colin Carberry feel generic and not even Richard Dormer's bullish display of roguish charm can prevent them from feeling overly familiar. The epiphanal gig lacks the requisite sense of simmering, sweaty seediness, while the schlepp around the offices of pompous London twits who wouldn't know a hit if it sloshed them across the chops is tiresomely clichéd and the decline and fall sequences feel so cut and pasted they mawkishly hark back to the songwriter biopics that Hollywood used to churn out in the 1940s and 50s.

Yet, there is something irresistible about a mythologising picture that makes the civil war raging on the streets outside seem less important than the hopes and woes of a monocular dreamer, whose essential selfishness and organisational incompetence should make him loathsome rather than inexplicably likeable. Derek Wallace's production design captures something of the drabness of the times, while Maggie Donnelly's costumes convey the punk individualism that negated religious and/or political affiliation. The soundtrack is also splendid, with empowering DIY rebelliousness roaring out of each song, although the inclusion of `Alternative Ulster' is a touch anachronistic, as Stiff Little Fingers weren't part of Hooley's stable.