Conor Lalor’s family life is falling apart. His parents are breaking up and they’re broke, there not being much work in Dublin in 1985. To economize, they take the 15-year-old out of his fee-paying Jesuit school and send him to the Christian Brothers’ school in Synge Street. Conor wants to impress the beautiful girl who lives across the street and he offers to put her in his music video. Raphina accepts and then he has to pull together a band with his school mates, which they call Sing Street. His older brother dissuades him from doing covers and they start writing original (if very Eighties) music. The band gets better and he draws closer to Raphina.

Sing Street brought back my own teens—my secondary school was half a mile south of Synge Street, and I was a 20-year-old university student in Dublin in 1985. However, I was never in a band: neither I nor my friends were musical.

It’s a funny, tender movie, with good music and strong per­for­mances from the mostly unknown cast, as you might expect from the writer-director of Once. Aside from the fan­tas­ti­cal ending, I greatly enjoyed it.