The musical jukebox genre has been quietly maturing since the days of Mamma Mia!, and in Chuck Chuck Baby it takes on a unique and intriguing form. This directorial debut from Janis Pugh follows Helen (Louise Brealey), a down-on-her-luck chicken-factory worker who lives with her ex-husband, as she rekindles a romance with Joanne (Annabel Scholey), the woman she fell for as a teenager. Adding a sense of novelty to this straightforward kitchen-sink drama is each character’s habit of singing popular hits from yesteryear as though they were hearing them on the radio. These aren’t attempts to capture the essence of the songs themselves, but to evoke the interior lives of those singing them.

After years of being typecast as a shy and retiring loner in works like Sherlock or Brian And Charles, it’s a joy to watch Brealey given a role with as much heft as her talent deserves, coming to terms with her strengths and weaknesses in shades of subtle and quiet confidence. Such delicacy can’t be found elsewhere in the film, though, its central motif of working-class residential areas as prisons is so obvious that Pugh might as well be shouting it at you through a megaphone; and almost every secondary character is underdeveloped to the point of garish caricature. Yet the relationship between Helen and Joanne papers over a lot of these cracks, evoking a warm centre at the heart of a cruel world.

Chuck Chuck Baby reviewed as part of Edinburgh International Film Festival.