'Happy-go-Lucky', Mike Leigh, 2008

London, the present. Poppy (Sally Hawkins) is an exuberant thirty-year old primary school teacher sharing a rented flat with a friend. She enjoys trampolining, flamenco and cycling, until her bicycle is stolen. This event leads her to driving lessons and a series of encounters with an unstable driving instructor (Eddie Marsan)that eventually reveal Poppy to be more clear-headed than she purports to be. Along the way, Poppy's life is compared with that of her two sisters, and the expectations of contemporary society.

Often film-makers lose their character over time. Woody Allen for instance, once a strong flavour, now makes highly competent yet dissappointingly bland films. Sometimes they clearly don't: Kevin Lynch, say. Mike Leigh falls into the latter category.

In 'Vera Drake' and 'Secrets and Lies' Leigh reigned himself in, or at least compartmentalised his weakness for caricature. You could still spot his traits in there but they didn't grate so much as to interfere. After all, I only saw the resemblance between Imelda Staunton's Vera and Beatrix Potter's Mrs Tiggywinkle when it was pointed out to me.

In 'Happy-go-Lucky' he has let himself go, the first hour being the film equivalent of a self-indulgent guitar solo. The Mike Leigh cliches come fast and thick, all piling up in the perception: the female characters are his dolls, dressed as loons, speaking nasally through pursed lips. All that Camden Market schmutter and pastiches of Katrin Cartlidge ('Naked', 1993) gets pretty wearing. With the quirkiness dial turned all the way clockwise, it's a profoundly irritating advert for positivity. As a cartoon, fine, but with real people on the screen it resembles clumsy and over-saturated satire.

But there are some good scenes. So good they pay back the price of the ticket (£12 at my local Curzon ffs), but then induce despair at the rest of the film by comparison.

The flamenco teacher, another cliche but an engaging one, a performance rather than a collection of tics.

The social worker, and the scene in which he first appears, seem to have arrived from the set next door. Perhaps it's a swap and there's a complete buffoon somewhere in the next Ken Loach flick. Such a genuine, human, likeable fellow, surrounded by clowns.

The scenes with the driving instructor (in Vera Drake Marsan was a cowering shuffling introvert) had some depth - somewhere in there was a convincing portrayal of an everyday racist, the angry yelling motorist, the creepy stalker, the paranoid conspiracy theorist. In response to his worst onslaught Poppy suddenly becomes an adult, a credible human being, with the depth of character to properly engage with him.

The underlying premise of the film is appealing: a person genuinely happy in her own life and true to herself. Proof that one can live outside the mortgage-marriage-babies consensus, without needing to reside in a teepee. There's a film to be made about this, to show the reality of all those people happy as they are, regardless of the Sunday supplement template. Or a book to be written, several songs to be sung. And 'Happy-go-Lucky' sort of did it. If only there hadn't been all that primary coloured eyeshadow, bangles, and yelping.