HOWZAT

What is more disappointing is the fact that so much of this too-familiar Brit Grit, with its triumph against the odds storylines and whiff of whimsy, is still getting made. Granted, a darker dimension to the story — the spectre of depression — gives Johnny Lee Miller something to get his teeth into: his Obree is a whip-thin man with thighs like steel cable and haunted eyes who rides to escape his own personal demons.

Ultimately, however, it’s a fairly conventional piece of filmmaking that pushes all the right buttons. Despite its passion for two wheels, the picture has a pedestrian feel.

Another picture aimed squarely at the apparently lucrative market for lovable British eccentrics is Driving Lessons, a semi-autobiographical tale from the writer/director Jeremy Brock. The Harry Potter alumnus Rupert Grint does a nice line in inarticulate adolescent angst as a gauche teenager who escapes his oppressively uptight mother by going to work for an ageing alcoholic actress (Julie Walters, having an indecent amount of fun with the role of the obscenity-spouting old lush). A chaotic, booz-sodden trip to the Edinburgh Festival is part of his job description.

It’s watchable but unremarkable, and rather marred by the Big Embarrassing Flamboyant Ending that seems to be a prerequisite of a certain kind of British cinema at the moment. Richard Curtis has a lot to answer for.

More interesting is Andrew Piddington’s The Killing Of John Lennon, a handsomely photographed meditation on the flip side of fandom. The descent from inept prank caller to delusional assassin is told through the eyes of Lennon’s killer Mark David Chapman, his obsessions and interior monologue laid bare.

Carrying the picture pretty much single-handedly is Jonas Ball as Chapman. He finds little in his character to invoke our sympathy but he commands our attention absolutely. The style is heady, often claustrophobic, and very effective at suggesting the inside of Chapman’s short-circuiting mind.

But Piddington lets himself get bogged down in detail, resulting in an over-long picture that continues past its logical end: the shooting.

The music industry also factors in Brothers of the Head, an engagingly offbeat mockumentary from Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe (the team behind Lost in La Mancha, the real documentary about Terry Gilliam’s failed attempt to make his Don Quixote film).

Adapted from a Brian Aldiss story by Tony Grisoni, who wrote the screenplay for another Gilliam film, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and is the subject of a Script Factory event tomorrow night, the film tells of the rise and fall of the Bang Bang, a fictional 1970s band fronted by a pair of conjoined twins — and yes, we do get to see the join.

The cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle utilises a variety of different film stocks to create everything from fake Super 8 footage of the band in rehearsal to polished film footage supposedly culled from an aborted feature film project (Ken Russell makes a cameo appearance as the thwarted director).

The twins are played by the charismatic newcomers Harry and Luke Treadaway, twins in real life, who bring an anguished urgency to the live performances and a confrontational sexual presence. The Yoko Ono in this story is a rock journalist who tries to come between the brothers — difficult to do, considering that they share a liver.

But the most destructive love affair of all is with the drugs and alcohol that slightly numb the pain of this unusually close fraternal relationship. Ultimately, one of the film’s major achievements is that what we’re watching is not a freak show but a human tragedy, the themes of which — addiction, self-destruction and the bitter cost of fame — are universal.

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