Movie Nation

You don’t think much about “character arc” in a movie until you stumble across a movie that forgets to tidy that detail up.

In “Fisherman’s Friends,” the reliable character actor Daniel Mays plays Londoner and musical talent manager Danny, the man who discovers Cornwall fishermen who’ve kept sea chanteys alive, as their ancestors did, for centuries. Danny turns them into pop stars in this “true story” about a British singing phenomenon of about ten years ago.

This sort of thing happens all the time in the UK, land of “The X-Factor,” Susan Boyle and — when I was a kid in the ’70s — Laurel & Hardy singing their way onto the pop charts, decades after their deaths, with the novelty tune “Trail of the Lonesome Pine.”

Either the real manager “Danny” got to the screenwriters, to Daniel Mays or his lawyers did. Because the edge is utterly rubbed off him. The classic way of portraying this guy is cynical, self-dealing city slicker who is moved, reformed and maybe butched-up by his dealings with working men of the sea. And there’s nothing of that to him, no edge, no real “journey” from A to B for this character to take.

Danny is pranked by his douche of a boss (Noel Clarke) on a group bachelor party/scouting trip to Port Isaac on the Cornwall coast, left behind by that boss to “sign,” “do what you do” with these ten local fishermen who sing “Nelson’s Blood,” “Blow the Man Down” and “What d’ye Do With a Drunken Sailor” on the docks every weekend they aren’t at sea.

To crusty Jim (James Purefoy, terrific), his crustier Dad Jago (veteran character actor David Hayman) and “the lads,” this Danny fellow is “just some wanker from London.”

But Danny, on the fly, starts in on “tradition” and “authenticity” and works his wordy charm, and they fall under his spell. It’s just that his boss, who ditched Danny there with lousy cell service and no transport to the big city “until they sign on the dotted line,” was just pranking him. His big talk of singers who “look the part” and songs “in the public domain” was just that. Danny?

“I gave them my word.”

So straight off, he’s a decent sort, an honorable man and somebody with no place in the cutthroat music business. If he can’t sneak out of town before making good, he’s in for a total immersion in generations of Port Isaac fishing culture.

“You’ll never know a man until you find out what his legs are made of…at SEA.”

And then there’s Jim’s single-mom daughter, the spunky Alwyn. As she’s played by Tuppence Middleton, Danny is of course smitten. And being a decent sort, from the start he’s chivalrous, charming her little girl if not her grumpy Dad.

When you label a tale like this “a true story” you’re kind of giving away the game. They don’t make movies about singers who don’t get a record deal and gain attention for it.

But even with much of the mystery missing, there are wrinkles in the tale, potholes — some tragic — on the path. As the fishermen also volunteer as the port’s rescue boat operators, there’s more than just fishing in the unforgiving sea that’s a risk.

As the poet Sir Walter Scott put it to any fishmarket shopper, “It’s no fish ye’re buying–it’s men’s lives.”

There’s also a sprinkling of “local color,” although not nearly as much as you’d hope from a movie that tells a 75 minute story in 112 minutes.

The coastal folk are “Yarney Goats,” and their nearby inland rivals are “Town Crows.”

Danny has to go to sea, but not “dressed for an America’s Cup.” And dammit man, mind what colors ye wear aboard our boats.

“Fishermen don’t wear green. Makes the boat seek land!”

The scenery is lovely, the pub life palpably real and the songs, depending on your taste and “saltiness,” are lovely, rich and occasionally hilarious.

Note for North American viewers, there’s a joke about “The National Anthem” that you only get if you realize Cornwall was never formally bound in treaty to England and Britain. Kind of like Key West.

The movie this most closely resembles is the similar “true story” “Calendar Girls,” only with no nudity and less comic edge.

Still, Middleton, Purefoy, Hayman and Mays are interesting enough on their own that they make this mixed-bag of a movie tolerable even when it tests your patience, even when the characters don’t really take a personal journey that anyone could call “a character arc.”

MPA Rating: Rated PG-13 for some strong language, and suggestive references

Cast: Daniel Mays, Tuppence Middleton, James Purefoy, David Hayman, Maggie Steed and Noel Clarke.

Credits: Directed by Chris Foggin, script by Piers Ashworth, Meg Leonard and Nick Moorcraft. A Samuel Goldwyn release on Netflix.

Running time: 1:52

Topic has become my go-to source for international TV series worth bingeing through in a year when mere American series just won’t do.

Their latest offering, debuting on Dec. 24, is the Swedish dramedy “Love Me,” twelve episodes that take three Swedish couples through the trials of new love, faded love, breakup and even death over the course of a season.

It’s been nabbed by US network ABC for remaking, with Elizabeth Banks a central member of the team pulling that adaptation together.

Perhaps she’ll be the creating producer/star, as Josephine Bornebusch is for the Swedish show. She plays Clara, a 30something statuesque and striking blonde OB-GYN whom we meet on a nightmare Tinder date.

It begins with “You don’t look anything like your photo (in Swedish, with English subtitles) and descends into Mr.-Out-of-His-League-and-Clueless blurting charges of “egotistical woman” and ends with Clara’s “This look you’ve got going for you” — baggy pants, odd colors and a Bozo hairdo — “you look like a clown!“

She lives alone, binges the singles-couple-up show “Paradise Hotel” and late night candy runs. Which is how her “meet cute” with flirty-hunky mansplainer Peter (Sverrir Gudnason) begins. He’s obviously interested, fake-“stalks” her home (he lives in the building next door) and doesn’t formally meet her until she comes home drunk off her bum after a bender.

Love at first vomit?

Aron (Gustav Lindh) is head-over-heels with his “love eternal,” tattooed and sexually insatiable DJ Elsa (Dilal Gwyn). He can’t get through college exams or job interviews until he shows up for them, and their epic coitus always makes him late. A wrinkle? She’s a “provocative” DJ who underdresses the part and vamps up her late night club work. And he’s got a too-cute pal/confessor, Jenny (Sofia Karemyr) who seems more his type, and seems to think so as well as she plants seeds of doubt.

He’s also Clara’s much-younger brother.

And the examples of love they both grew up under were their parents. Dad/Sten (Johan Ulveson) dotes on their mother, and gives the impression he’s been doing forever. And in the first couple of episodes, we learn why as we catch up with them (Ia Langhammer plays Kersti, the wife) as the family gathers for their 40th wedding anniversary.

Things are not as they first appear.

“Love Me” veers from cute and affectionate to judgmental, rash and lashing out as the assorted couples connect, disconnect, argue and make-up. Aron is prone to tirades over their “future together” and everything that Elsa does to jeopardize that. He’s quite young, all-in and all-or-nothing that way.

And Elsa more or less just takes it.

Sten stoically takes on the role of the doormat everybody dumps on, from his wife to gossipy friends to his kids. Even booking a “Senior Love Romantic” getaway with his wife finds him bullied and up-sold by a young travel agent who plays the “budget” oriented husband-spending “shame” card to perfection.

Clara’s “case” is the trickiest and funniest. She’s on-the-spectrum blunt, not wholly self-aware how abrasive she is but funny at being obnoxious. She has a married confidante (Nina Zanjani) who rolls her eyes at Clara’s “picky” criteria for a mate. There’s even a moment where she blurts out her fury at love and life and her unhealthy relationship with her mother as she’s screaming “PUSH” at a patient giving birth.

And Aron confides in Jenny as he struggles to convince Elsa of his commitment to their “eternal love,” which he naively assumes is what his parents have.

Yeah, it’s like that.

“Love Me” is touching and romantic and fun, and my best advice is that you catch the first season of it on Topic before ABC takes a whack at it. Elizabeth Banks seems a safe bet for making the American version come off, but you never know.

MPA Rating: TV-MA: Smoking, alcohol and drug abuse, sex, nudity, profanity

Cast: Josephine Bornebusch, Johan Ulveson, Gustav Lindh, Sofia Karemyr, Dilan Gwyn, Ia Langhammer, Sverrir Gudnason, Görel Crona and Nina Zanjani

Credits: Josephine Bornebusch. Streaming on Topic.

Running time: 12 episodes @43 minutes each

Oh temptress smart phone, is there nothing you can’t ruin, given half a chance?

Globe-trotting filmmaker Thomas Balmès has been filming in the Himalayas, Bhutan and other high plateaus of Asia since “Babies” (2010). But with “Happiness,” he found a a subject worth exploring in depth over a couple of documentaries. That 2013 film, which focused on the first “opening up” of remote, isolated Bhutan to TV and electronic connection to the world, paves the way for his latest, about how the Internet is changing this legendarily scenic and devoutly religious part of the world.

“Sing Me a Song” follows Peyangki, a very young sāmaṇera (novice Buddhist monk) when we meet him. Balmès meets him at age eight, a contemplative child who claims to have preferred the monastery and a monastic future to “regular school” and life picking medicinal mushrooms with his mother.

And then we see a cell tower going up. “Ten years later,” you can guess a lot of what’s changed about Peyangki, but there’s even more you can’t.

Young sāmaṇera recite prayers in unison at what seems a more manic than spirutual pace. Almost to a one, they’re on their phones as they do — texting, playing games. It’s a jaw-dropping moment.

Whatever one thinks of the tranquility that looks a lot like boredom in eight year-old Peyangki lying on a mountainside regarding the flowers, the cell-phone transformation of him and the monastery is simply shocking.

“Any type of song,” he purrs, in Dzongkha with English subtitles, “as long as it’s a LOVE song.”

The teen monks are girl-crazy, swapping messages and calls with city girls on the WeChat app. That’s where the film gets its title, teen Pegangki requesting a song from a new online hook-up.

Damn, boy!

He and his peers are slacking off, neglecting their studies, claiming “Maybe I’m just not intelligent” enough to memorize the stanzas and stanzas of prayers, the ritual dances (“Stop looking at your feet!”).

He catches up with his mother, admitting he “didn’t learn very much.” But with a camera crew there, she doesn’t show alarm.

“If you commit to religion and get enlightenment, I will be happy!”

Pressure? A little. Maybe.

A trip with the novices into town is even more rattling. They blow their cash on game cafes to gorge on first-person-shooter video games, and street markets where they buy toy guns to play “war” with back at the monastery.

Say what now?

It brings to mind assorted Monty Python “nuns making mayhem” sketches, this shaved-head mob in red robes wandering city streets, window-shopping and ogling girls.

And then Peyangki tracks down Ugyen, the fetching young woman he’s been sweet-talking for weeks, maybe months. As we’ve seen her putting on makeup with her friends, discussing their life options, curious about work in Kuwait or how much a mushroom picker from the village of Laya could earn, she and her friends scroll through screens of pricy purses and designer shoes on their smart phones.

Sure, young man meets young woman on the Internet is a tale as old as Al Gore. But how does any of this jibe with a monastic life?

And as Peyangki gets gentle scoldings over his childish passions, hearing that “guns will never benefit you,” we wonder how much further he can go wrong and just how wrong you have to go before they kick you out.

Twenty years ago, the screen comedy “The Cup” captured something of this stereotype-shattering culture shock — Tibetan monks mad for the World Cup, hellbent on getting access to a TV so they could watch it. “Sing Me a Song” lets us consider how fast the world has changed since then, even mimicking that movie with a scene where the young and younger monks gather to watch a match. Half of them can’t look up from their phones long enough to take in Ronaldo’s performance.

The awkwardness of the immature, cloistered young man meeting the young woman — who has a child, he finds out (AFTER we do) — with an agenda and needs of her own is almost painful to watch.

Scenes like that, the myriad of camera angles showing a little boy hiking up a hillside and terribly intimate moments caught on camera make one wonder if there’s some “staging” going on here, if this is another documentary that is flirting with “docudrama” status.

Not that we don’t believe every single thing we see in “Sing Me a Song.” And even if we see “trouble” the minute we spy that first phone, we don’t necessarily guess how this fascinating “speed of change” story will play out.

MPA Rating: unrated, adult situation

Cast:  Peyangki, Ugyen

Credits: Directed by Thomas Balmès. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:41

They’ve been called “dead teenager movies” ever since Siskel and Ebert gave them that label. And they follow the same formula, the same “rules” the world over — even in Poland.

“Nobody Sleeps in the Woods Tonight,” or “W lesie dzis nie zasnie nikt,” is a classic “filmy z martwymi nastolatkami (dead teenagers movie).”

It’s got teens — some of them archetypal “horny teenagers.” They’re in the forest, shipped there by their parents because they’ve become device and gaming and social media addicts.

And there’s something or someone there out to slaughter them, one by one.

The characters are The Usual Suspects — the nerd (Michal Lupa), the self-absorbed Youtube “star” (Sebastian Dela), the bombshell blonde (Wiktoria Gasiewska), the bully who might be projecting (Stanislaw Cywka)and the quiet girl with the Big Secret and the switchblade (Julia Wieniawa-Narkiewicz).

Only the nerd, prattling on about worries, movies and his gaming career, makes much of an impression. And everything he says and does has been acted out 144 times before in other dead teenager movies, most of them in English.

But we don’t watch such films for the surprises. We watch for the creative, twisted and sometimes funny means of slaughter, the nudity, the “sex means a death sentence” familiarity and the jokes — often made by the nerdy “type” who’s made himself an expert on the genre and its immutable laws and rules.

“When groups split up, people die” Julek has observed. As have we. Many, many times. The thing that hamstrings “Nobody Sleeps in the Woods” is that even the jokes about the genre are so over-familiar that we know them (in English, or in Polish with English subtitles) before the set-up line is finished.

The threat isn’t unseen, but viewed in the open mere minutes into the movie. The threat is over-“explained” at some point.

And yes, the kids and their camp counselor (Gabriela Muskala) “split up.”

Any questions? Any doubt who will strip naked, or who will be the Last Camper Standing?

MPA Rating: TV-MA, bloody violence, sex, nudity

Cast: Julia Wieniawa-Narkiewicz, Michal Lupa, Wiktoria Gasiewska, Sebastian Dela, Stanislaw Cywka, Gabriela Muskala

Credits: Directed by Bartosz M. Kowalski, script by Bartosz M. Kowalski, Jan Kwiecinski and Mirella Zaradkiewicz. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:42

He’s pulled this together from the 56 hours of “unseen” Beatles studio footage.

Yeah, I thought we’d seen it all, too. Apparently not.

It’s all footage shot around the recording, rehearsing and build-up to the “rooftop” concert so famed in Beatles lore.

“Get Back” comes to theaters, and then to Netflix in early 2021

Here’s a fun martial arts Buddhist parable from the late pre-Jackie Chan era, a 1979 jewel that’s been newly-restored in ways that preserve the look, sound and feel of the age of the times, a moment in time caught amid the emergence of Hong Kong cinema.

King Hu’s “Raining in the Mountain” is a period piece with a large cast, an epic mountainside temple setting and a story that is filled with murderous intrigues and hilarious scheming and double-dealing.

An aged abbot (Sun Han) has summoned officials and benefactors to the Temple of Three Treasures to help pick his successor. General Wang (Feng Tien) and his Lieutenant Chang Chen (Kuang Yu Wang) have their reasons for backing this or that candidate.

I don’t know the Mandarin equivalent for “Quid pro quo,” but there’s a little of that in all this, too.

Esquire Wen (Yueh Sun) has more than just an agenda. He wants this rare “sutra” (scripture) that the monastery has in its scripture room. And when his “concubine” (Feng Hsu) and valet sneak off to take a look around and try their hand at picking a few locks, we see just what the rich benefactor has in mind. And the General and Lieutenant pick up on that, recognizing the sexy thief known as “White Fox” (Hsu) in Wen’s employ.

“There’s more to this man than meets the eye.”

What ensues is a near-comedy of intrigues, spying and skulking about with revelations about which of the three scheming candidate monks (Chun Shih, Paul Chun, Hui-Lou Chen) each backs to replace the venerable abbot.

The abbot and his most trusted aides concoct a Zen test or two to see which of the monks is best-suited to guide the temple in the future.

Hu (“Dragon Inn”) spared no expense for costumes, but the film has the unmistakable dated touches that made early Hong Kong cinema instantly recognizable, even with your eyes closed.

The music is largely tinkly Chinese theater comic “effect” sounds, and the soundtrack itself has that distinct tinny tone that the earliest Bruce Lee films sported. The sumptuous lighting and colors, symbolic and tonal depth of the classic Mainland (PRC) cinema developed in the ’80s is far off on the horizon.

The look is well-lit and flat.

This is an attempted “epic” from an industry (filmed in Hong Kong and Taiwan) that was churning out commercial fare on a budget, films often limited (as this one is) to a single main location.

But what Hu gets out of the temple setting is period perfect and heavily populated (many many monks) to an impressive degree And a madcap third act martial arts fight-chase (limited wire work, but lots of trampoline jumps) through forests, along the cliffs of a river, is whimsical with just a hint of grandeur about it.

MPA Rating: Unrated, violence

Cast: Feng Hsu, Yueh Sun, Chun Shih, Paul Chun, Hui-Lou Chen, Feng Tien, Lin Tung, Su Han and Kuang Yu Wang

Credits: Written and directed by King Hu. Now streaming on Film Movement+

Running time: 2:02

Homelessness has always been a part of the Christmas story, ever since there was “no room at the inn.” Something about the holiday lends itself to the pathos of those with no family to turn to, no secure place to stay when the weather turns cold and the rest of the society is fretting over celebrations and gifts.

“Hector” is such a story, a tale built around the earthy, working class Scot Peter Mullan, a favorite of Ken Loach, the producers of “West World,” the folks remaking “The Lord of the Rings” and anybody who wants some screen presence that carries “world weariness” about him.

In the title role, he’s a man long “on the road,” hitchhiking around Scotland and England, making treks between Glasgow and London — looking for a meal, a restroom to clean up in and a warm place to sleep.

We meet him as he’s getting an appointment from a nurse, a 60ish man using a crutch in a lifestyle that can ill afford that sort of disability.

He’s been at it for years and years, has his travel companions Dougie (Laurie Ventry) and Hazel (Natalie Gavin) and a spot where they can sleep under cardboard and manage to get by.

But Hector’s close enough to the last place his sister lived that he wants to try and look her up before heading to London for Christmas. There’s a shelter there he’s quite attached to every holiday.

Without a smart phone or computer, one-legged, he hobbles around looking for her with nothing but memories and old, outdated addresses in a dog-eared address book.

Writer-director Jake Gavin sets up several mysteries, the chief of which is one you could ask about any homeless person you meet. What’s Hector’s story? What’s the dark secret that put him here? And what is the urgency of him reconnecting with his family?

Gavin teases out clues as Hector makes an odyssey out of his snowy, rainy tour of the northern UK. A lot of homeless are alcoholics, but “I don’t drink.” We’re spared the American version of homelessness, a baseline of mentally ill people on the streets supplemented by a rising tide of broke people sent there by a collapsing economy. Hazel, a young woman who looks in her 30s and travels with them is another “type.”

“Look at me,” she laments. “I’m not even 18 and my life is already f—-d!”

There’s not a lot of complaining. Movies about those in this situation suggest “choice” as often the cause of their plight. Sure. A friend dies in the cold or some other high risk mishap, ruffians try to rob you of the few things you have, business owners, including a kindly diner waitress, automatically assume the worst.

But Gavin papers Hector’s path with major and minor angels, from the truckers and others (even a guy in a Maserati) who offer him a lift, others who give away rain slickers, food and connive to find a place for him and others to stay.

Sara (Sarah Solemani) is one shelter manager who knows him, but even she doesn’t have any picture of Hector’s “history.” That comes out in tiny drips and dabs.

And through it all Mullan is the weather-worn face of weary depression, resigned to a fate he may have chosen or that may have been thrust on him. He’s been out here longer than we think, and from the ways his search is coming up empty, he may have waited too long to reach back to his past.

“Hector” is also interesting for its portrayal of Britain’s safety net. Even a man in Hector’s position has health care, and even if there aren’t a lot of shelters, there’s a support system. Somehow, I think Gavin has both idealized and whitewashed this subject. No homeless people from other corners of the populace? West Indian? Pakistani or Indian? African?

What we’re given is a character who invites compassion, who makes us hope there’s somebody who cares about him enough to recognize him as kin. And Mullan, our tour guide down this road, is never less than dignified, defeated though the poor man might be.

So we hope and wait and cross our fingers for some lighter moment where Mullan can bend that Scots brogue into a gruff twinkle that he’s let us see in a long and distinguished character actor’s career.

MPA Rating: unrated, violence, profanity, alcohol abuse

Cast: Peter Mullan, Natalie Gavin, Laurie Ventry, Keith Allen, Ewan Stewart, Sarah Solemani and Gina McKee

Credits: Written and directed by Jake Gavin. A Film Movement+ streaming release.

Running time: 1:27

Long before the Kardashians or Trump press conferences, there was hate-watching. And it wasn’t just on TV. It could take place at a cineplex near you.

Pauly Shore brought it to the culture, to the movies and to a Blockbuster Video near you.

Now the 52 year-old star of “Son in Law,” “Bio-Dome,” “Jury Duty” and so many other abominations during a heyday that lasted longer than anybody could have imagined is back — on Netflix at least. That’s a good place for “Guest House,” a Lionsgate comedy about a renter who refuses to leave, the latest “tenant from Hell.”

Type. Casting.

It’s “Pacific Heights” without the edge, “Neighbors” without the fun or laughs. But stick around. A half hour in, his character gets hit with the haymaker we’ve all been craving lo these many years.

Sarah and Blake, played by Aimee Teegarden of TV’s “Friday Night Lights,” and Mike Castle of TV’s “Brews Brothers” are a young couple looking to buy a house. Checking out this roomy ranch-style with a big pool earns a “Shut up and take our money” to the realtor.

There’s a catch. There’s this guy living in the guest house behind the pool. Randy Cockfield (Shore) is hedonism itself, imbibing every drug known to humanity and right in front of them as they poke their noses into the cluttered bordello of collectibles he’s made out of their pool house.

But he’ll be gone in a month and it’ll be fine. Sure.

Randy quickly shows himself to be the poster child for California’s notorious “tenant’s rights laws.”

Somehow, Randy is meant to be charming enough to get them to postpone that “move-out date.” He’s supposed to be engaging enough to sweet talk a cop out of a jam. And Shore, decades removed from his catch-phrases and little hiccuping line readings, can’t manage that. Not for a second.

What Randy has, along with Tommy Lee’s “Sex Swing,” is a lot of stuff that Blake might have dabbled in back in the day. Now, he works at Shredd Industries, a skateboarding company run by a gonzo guy played by Steve-O. But Randy’s offer of a little toke, a little toot, is too much to pass up.

That raucous pool-party/orgie that Randy is throwing that Blake’s supposed to go down and break up? He ends up joining in and getting arrested.

Of course you know this means war.

There’s nudity and drugs and booze and lots of “trust fund kids” and “Go back to Marin County” insults for the Sarah and Blake, who’re plainly buying this place with the help of her Blake-hating Daddy (Billy Zane).

There are cameos by assorted Jackasses, and Chris Kattan and Lou Ferrigno Jr. (Yup.).

And nothing in this raunchy romp through excess registers or delivers a laugh. Shore is still annoying, but funny never figures into it.

Nothing is repeated, so it’s not useful as a drinking game movie either.

It’s just here for those who miss Mitzi Shore’s son on screen, somebody to hate watch for 84 minutes of your life that you will never get back.

MPA Rating: R for strong crude sexual content, drug use, graphic nudity and language throughout

Cast: Pauly Shore, Aimee Teegarden, Mike Castle, Billy Zane, Steve-O

Credits: Directed by Sam Macaroni, script by Sean Bishop, Troy Duffy. A Lionsgate film on Netflix.

Running time: 1:24

This film festival darling makes it into theaters and streaming on Jan. 5.

“Happy Face” is a challenging, uplifting and life-affirming Canadian dramedy that arrived to little fanfare a couple of years back, but which deserves to finally find its audience as it hits the major streaming services.

It’s about disfigured people in 1990s Montreal finally getting their power back through a hospital encounter group “workshop” that only gets results when it goes off the rails. And director Alexandre Franchi’s story journeys from touching to heartbreaking, shocking to hilarious.

They’re a varied group — a cop scarred in a fire, an aspiring model unwilling to give up the dream despite a facially-deforming birth defect, a cancer survivor who lost his real nose, others with skin conditions, injuries and scars. What they have in common is how society treats them, and how that’s made them withdrawn, depressed and afraid of the world.

They have lost loved ones, or the chance to meet someone, the mere ability to go out in public without being ridiculed or discriminated against.

The counselor leading them through “therapy” is Vanessa (Debbie Lynch-White), once a child model and actress, now morbidly obese and “a second-class citizen, like you” trying to navigate a world eager to “judge me.”

She will instruct her charges in the dangers of “all or nothing thinking” and “catastrophizing,” rehearse them in “Body Language for a Better Connection” and bring them out of the “ugly” shells their bodies have become to them.

The youngest member wears a hoodie, his face contorted and obscured by medical bandages. Sullen Augustine (Robin L’Houmeau) wants to become a better person, but Vanessa and we have our doubts.

“I don’t like imposters,” she hisses at him when she’s had enough.

When we him out of the bandages, handsome, 19 and splitting his time between Dungeons & Dragons and bar pickups, we share Vanessa’s anger. Then we meet his mom (Noémie Kocher), their apartment decorated with modeling shots from her youth. She laments her looks after her breast cancer surgery. She spits in fury about the husband, the boy’s father, leaving her. And the cancer isn’t gone.

“Stan,” who is using his mother’s name “Augustine” in the group, has things to work out. And once he’s “outed” in the group, the failing therapy falls by the wayside, a little Stan-inspired “face your demons” tough love takes over and “Happy Face” finds its heart, its humor and its pathos as Stan finds his true purpose.

The script makes the kid near-clairvoyant (absurdly so) in his ability to “read” the others, their fears and injuries — some self-inflicted. He baits and triggers one and all. But as he wavers over his ability to come to grips with his mother’s condition and sees and hears her at her losing-control worst, his impulsive actions in the group — trashing a restaurant whose staff discriminates, shaming swimmers who ridicule others’ looks — inspire his new friends.

Co-writer/director Franchi (“The Wild Hunt”) stomps through this scenario like a bull in a Montreal china shop, stopping to take us into 1990s D&D culture, making that pre-Internet “avatar” story-telling game a cute analogy for what the disfigured live with every day.

Weaving Wagner’s heroic “Siefried’s Funeral March” from “Gotterdammerung,” made memorable in “Excalibur,” just gives the stunts, breakthroughs and struggle we witness not just a human dimension, but a heroic one.

Unblinkingly grappling with the horrors of life crumbling towards an early, canceros end, using actors with real disfigurements and letting them extemporize on their experiences of the world (via the script) give “Happy Face” much more than entertainment value. It’s the rarest of films that truly allows us to see that world through another’s eyes.

MPA Rating: unrated, violence, nudity, sex, profanity

Cast: Debbie Lynch-White, Robin L’Houmeau, Noémie Kocher, David Roche, Alison Midstokke

Credits: Directed by Alexandre Franchi, script by Joelle Bourjolly, Alexandre Franchi. On Netflix and Amazon.

Running time: 1:38