Hitting a high note

Dir: Marc Evans

With: Minnie Driver, Robert Pugh, Aneurin Barnard

Running time: 109 minutes

MARC Evans's slight but highly endearing drama, set in the long, hot summer of 1976, locks on to its fortysomething target audience like a heat-seeking missile.

It's an unashamed nostalgia fest, a theme park built around memories of school, Bowie, ELO, and other first loves. It's about good teachers and bad, kids with promising futures and not so promising ones, bullies and angels, saviours and sinners. Think Grange Hill with a soundtrack by John Peel.

If it was just another tiresome trip down that boulevard of broken dreams known as adolescence it wouldn't bear the film of the week tag. Cleverly, through its mix of mildly soapy storylines, pop classics, and cheeky humour, Hunky Dory will speak as much to the Glee generation as the two-cars-and-a-mortgage set.

Minnie Driver plays Vivienne, or as she is known to the teenagers around her, "Miiiii-ssss". Vivienne is one of those trendy teachers who appeared in the Seventies full of stuff and nonsense about child-centred education and maximising creative potential. Vivienne would no more teach to the test than she would vote Tory.

The drama teacher at a south Wales comprehensive, she has one chief ambition. "I want to put on a show that William Shakespeare and David Bowie would be proud of." Mercifully, she doesn't call it Diamond Bards or Much Ado About Ziggy. She's an old hippy out of her time, but she's not that lame. Vivienne plans to stage The Tempest, Shakespeare's tale of love and redemption, using the musical talents of her young task and the tunes of the times.

To succeed she must battle a tempest of her own made up of scathing colleagues (Haydn Gwynne as a wonderfully dismissive social studies teacher, Steve Spiers as a dictatorial PE master), a doubting headmaster (the always reliable Robert Pugh of Master and Commander, Bleak House, and many a TV drama) and the lure of the lido, a favourite watering hole for the local youth as the temperature rises.

Screenplay writer Laurence Coriat assembles a pick and mix of characters, from the brothers trying to cope after their mum has walked out to the youngster who thinks he's gay and the teenager trying to escape a bullying sibling. The girls are just as busy coping with finding the right boyfriend and looking good at the lido (memo to younger readers: re the teens' habit of rubbing vegetable oil on their skin in lieu of suntan lotion, don't try that at home. We were hard as cold chips in the Seventies).

As the plot strolls hither and yon the attention goes AWOL at times. As with any ensemble drama, some of the stories are simply more interesting than others. There is also the feeling of "issues" being crowbarred in to cover as many facets of adolescence as possible.

While the teachers are lovingly rendered clichés – just once, it would be nice to see a PE teacher reading Tolstoy – sometimes the cliché works. Driver, accent immaculate, is a hoot as the miss who likes a drink and a laugh and a cuss as much as the next young woman. She's a game and likeable old bird, Vivienne, or will be if she ever grows up.

What never fails to impress in Hunky Dory is the power of the music. Rearranged to fit voices and makeshift instruments such as half-filled milk bottles, versions of tunes such as Life on Mars and It's a Living Thing prove to be unexpectedly moving. Evans has managed to capture the raw, simple joy of music, that moment when a connection is made between head and heart. Whether it is brilliant acting on the part of his young cast or the real thing, they all look genuinely, blissfully, lost in the moment.

Audiences, younger ones especially, have a natural resistance to characters bursting into song. In the case of Hunky Dory, as in Glee, the songs take place during rehearsals for an event that is to happen later. When the performance does take place in Hunky Dory it's an impressive sight and heartening sound. However resistant you may have been at the start to Evans's tale of schooldays and glam rock standards, by the end it has somehow charmed its way into your affections. Just another school drama, but one that captures the fleeting optimism of youth as surely as it charts the temperature during the summer which never seemed to end.

Whatever vintage you are, there's nothing new to learn from this tale of Welsh schooldays. It's not going to set the Valleys alight with its piercing insights and commentary on the youth of yesteryear. It is, however, highly likely to have you leave the cinema smiling, as if you had felt the warmth of 1976 again for real. For the beginning of March, when summer holidays, school and otherwise, seem as far off as ever, that's a result.