SWEET & LOWDOWN

Written & directed by Woody Allen. Starring Sean Penn, Samantha Morton, Uma Thurman

Eccentric, sweet, thoroughly off-beat and endlessly entertaining, Woody Allen's latest work is a welcome relief in the worst cinematic summer on record. Whatever your personal reservations about the guy's misogyny and thin-skinned misanthropy, Allen has never made a bad film or a boring one, and Sweet & Lowdown doesn't disappoint.

It's a fictional biopic of the non-existent thirties jazz guitarist Emmet Ray, and although it's infused with all of the cheery hatefulness that has tended to distinguish Allen's latter-day output, the thing somehow winds up with considerable charm and true poignancy.

Our anti-hero – hard-drinking, womanising, psychologically maladjusted jazz-prodigy Emmet Ray – is as memorable and complex a character as has been seen on screen all year, and in spite of his out-and-out nastiness and total self-absorption, he still manages to come across as possibly the most endearing freak since Johnny Depp's portrayal of Ed Wood.

Ray guzzles vast quantities of booze, treats his women like pond slime, is partial to the odd blast of opium, and spends his recreational time firing shotgun-blasts at the rats who inhabit his local rubbish dump (especially when he's on a date).

In the meantime, he finances his extravagant lifestyle by doubling as a small-time pimp, and though sociable in a freak-extrovert sense, displays a near-autistic inability to relate to anyone in his universe.

Sean Penn, in possibly his most physical role to date, is in truly magnificent form: he portrays Ray as more a bundle of flaws than a character, a buffoonish and gracelessly animated idiot savant whose facial expression – generally one of petulant malevolence – switches to a look of simpleton ecstasy when he's indulging his guitar adoration.

Lowdown's key plot premise is the hero's strange sort of love affair with Hattie (Samantha Morton), a mute (but not deaf) waif whose demeanour recalls the silent screen heroines of the twenties – he fires a constant barrage of insults in her direction, but she still adoringly basks in the glow of his very presence.

Morton's Oscar-nominated performance is every bit as soulful, expressive and compelling as the role demands, and though the pair of them may initially seem one of the least prepossessing couples you've ever set eyes on, it transpires to be pretty affecting stuff.

The hideously overrated Uma Thurman turns up halfway through by way of an unnecessary diversion, portraying the five-hundreth preening vamp of her career as a self-styled Anaïs Nin novelist-type who gets her claws into our infantile hero for a while, but the show is completely stolen by Penn and Morton.

Sweet & Lowdown hasn't threatened any box-office records, but few who watch it will have any cause for regret. This is another classy piece of work from a genuinely great movie-maker.