Happy-Go-Lucky

Modern life is not rubbish for Poppy, a 30-year-old wanting to teach the world to sing.

Sharing a flat with her best mate Zoe (Zegerman), she is living life on her own terms.

When her bike is nicked, it provides an opportunity to take driving lessons and see the good in more people - even her angry, neurotic instructor Scott (Marsan), and the bully in her class.

Like Poppy, Happy-Go-Lucky is a film with its heart in the right place. Unfortunately, it falls foul of Mike Leigh's tendency to turn everything up to 11.

Thought Brenda Blethyn was screechy in Secrets and Lies? She was on hippo tranquilizers compared to Hawkins' overbearing, motormouthed, toddler-on-the-wrong-end-of-a-bag-of-sugar performance.

Naked's David Thewlis a little too misanthropic? Spend five minutes in the company of Eddie Marsan's Scott, a boggled-eyed rage-ball who foams into his beard when spouting race hate and homophobia.

Problem is, despite Happy-Go-Lucky's London locations it feels artificial, particularly as an interesting sub-plot (the class bully's troubled home life) is raised merely to get Poppy a boyfriend and then dropped, while nothing-to-offer scenes (including an encounter with a classically trained tramp) are allowed a place at the table.

Occasionally, Leigh lowers the volume, and glimpses of a much better film flash through.

Poppy's scene with a hunky social worker coaxing the truth out of the troubled kid is a note-perfect winner, and a BBQ at her pregnant sister's touches on the toe-curling brilliance of High Hopes.

But no amount of forced gaiety can disguise the fact that Leigh hasn't made a really good film since 1993's Naked.

Happy-Go-Lucky might have sit-com spin-off potential, but like one of Poppy's driving lessons, it lurches around, grinding gears, and ends up back where it started.

Rob Daniel