My Name is Joe

Strident social realist Ken Loach revisits the Glasgow ghettos of 1998's Carla's Way for an unvarnished, intimate portrait of proletariat life on the brink. Recovering alcoholic Joe (Peter Mullan) lives the AA way -- "one day at a time" -- siphoning his renewed vigor into coaching a football team of pasty misfits and sparking a wee love with a tender-hearted health-care worker (Louise Goodall). Although Joe's is an existence of reclaimed hope, it's also one of gossamer fragility, a point made dramatically clear when he's sucked into the leg-breaking underworld of the city's drug trade.

Mullan, who nabbed a Best Actor trophy at Cannes, is a riveting contradiction of puckishness and perseverance, the sanguine flip side to Nick Nolte's denial-addled drunk in Affliction. Goodall, too, shapes an affecting performance, despite a script that skimps on its supporting players. The melodrama may be as thick as the burrs (subtitles are provided to a grateful audience), yet Loach, cinema's dogged chronicler of the working-class scrapper, never buffs the grit with sententiousness or sentimentality. An average Joe this is not.

-- Alicia Potter