How nice is too nice? How sunny too sunny? Just how much Technicolor optimism can one working class corner of London bear before thoroughly breaking down the purveyor of this bubbly outlook with the grim scowl of reality? These are the questions posed in Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky. And Leigh knows a thing or two about those grim realities. He’s spent much of his career exploring just how they rip us apart.

Sally Hawkins stars as Poppy, a 30-year-old London primary school teacher with a smile and a joke always at the ready, whether for the dour-faced commuters on the bus or her sour-tempered driving instructor. Her disposition is so relentlessly cheery that even when she locks up her back during her weekly trampoline class (Leigh uses shots of Poppy endlessly bouncing to great metaphorical effect), her response to the intense pain is to giggle even as she winces. Poppy is on one candy-colored ride of a life, and wants to bring everyone along with her, cheering up the surly bookshop clerk, getting to the bottom of why one of her young students is acting out violently, even reaching out to a homeless man of marginal sanity in a dark and deserted construction site.