Larry Crowne

OLDER DEMOGRAPHIC counterprogramming ahoy. Weedier than the Capraverse and at least seven kinds of twee – you can tell it’s a Tom Hanks picture from the Kool Aid smiles.

With only two features to his credit as a writer-director, the Oscar-winning actor has established an authorial tone not unlike the boyish, wide-eyed schtick that made him a genuine movie star. Just as That Thing You Do– Hanks's 1996 freshman film-making effort – restaged the rock'n'roll explosion of the 1960s as a defanged, Dayglo light comedy, Larry Crowne finds all kinds of gee-whizz solutions to the current economic crisis.

As the film opens, our titular hero is downsized from his middle- management position in a box company and headed towards financial oblivion. There’s no way Larry will ever pay off that second mortgage now. His friendly African- American neighbours on his friendly integrated street suggest community college, thus giving our downtrodden hero a chance to fall in with an equally friendly scooter gang and an initially unfriendly lecturer, played by Julia Roberts.

Aye, there's the rub; what Larry Crowneneeds is what we in the trade call a Manic Pixie Dream Girl (MPDG) to spruce him up a bit, feng shui his apartment and sort out his book-keeping crisis. Hanks's screenplay, co-written with My Big Fat Greek Wedding auteur Nia Vardalos, provides as much with Gugu Mbatha-Raw, a lovely livewire teenager.

But wait. Tom Hanks might be a skilled and professional actor, but nobody is ever going to buy him running around with an adolescent MPDG. So according to the film they’re just good friends until Tom, in turn, is ready to play MPDG to brittle, permanently tipsy Julia.

This weird dichotomy at the heart of the script ought to torpedo the entire venture, but Larry Crowneis too breezy, too cheesy and too damned good-natured to warrant anything like structural analysis. The happy-clappy, best-foot-forward, lean-on-me treatment of personal debt may amount to a big fib. But it's a nice fib.

It’s a Tom Hanks fib – like the truth, only better.