The guy from Belle & Sebastian revives the classic movie musical and leaves all soft hearts in the room broken and aglow. This is wonderful. The characters here are fresh-faced indie kids, the setting is gloomy Scotland and the mood is wrapped up in youthful misery and the tortures of love. Sounds like perfect musical territory to me. It helps that Stuart Murdoch’s songs are such immaculate pieces of pop song architecture, sophisticated, easy on the ears and fraught with drama. He’s a songwriter who actually writes. His songs spin full-blooded characters and scenarios. More than just their melodies stick with you. Those songs are all over this story of a group of kids with modest ambitions of starting a band only to find that one of them, the crazy girl with the bob haircut and who’s straight from the sanitarium, is a songwriting genius. In a bold move, Murdoch uses his own songs as evidence of that genius. I see no problem here.