OLLY ALEXANDER, HANNAH MURRAY, AND EMILY BROWNING IN GOD HELP THE GIRL

Summer in Glasgow, growing up, forming a band

(Preview. See full review HERE.)

God Help the Girl is a coming of age musical, or musical coming of ageer, and the directing debut of Glasgow group Belle & Sebastian's Stuart Murdoch. It's charming, wispy, wistful, whimsical, pretty, and a bit overlong. If you like Murdoch's music and his brand of adorable twee, you will absolutely love this film and want to hang out with it for ages. If not, you probably just won't get it.

Eve (Australian actress Emily Browning, but playing English) is a young woman whose emotional and food issues have led her to be spending a spate of time in a Glasgow hospital. The greatest her caretaker and counselor Miss B (Cora Bisset) hopes for is that she'll get her feet on the ground and apply to college. It's the start of summer, she takes a runner, and at a band show discovers James (Olly Alexander), who plays guitar, sings, and works as a lifeguard at the university pool. They become inseparable as James and Eve join up with rich-girl Cassie, who's been taking guitar lessons from James, to form a band. Eve gives a tape of her music to a handsome young European musician, Anton (Pierre Boulanger, the boy in Monsieur Ibrahim, serving as a background hunk as in Monte Carlo) to show to an impressario. Anton and Eve have a fling, but the tape goes astray. Eve and James set to it writing songs, which of course all come out in in Stuart Murdoch's autobiographical indie rock style.

God Help the Girl, 111 mins., debuted at Sundance in January 2014 and showed at Berlin and a number of other festivals. It's US theatrical release date is 5 September. The Metascore is up to 57. (Bay Area Roxie Theater 12 September).

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.