Funny Cow film review: A tang of authenticity that stays with you

There’s a scene towards the end of the darkly funny and quietly brilliant Funny Cow where Maxine Peake’s stand-up comic, known to us only by her titular stage name, is walking on a beach with her alcoholic mother (Lindsey Coulson).

The brassy Yorkshirewoman, based loosely on Marti Caine, has finally summoned up the courage to take her mother to task for failing to protect her from her violent father. In a Hollywood movie, or a British film with ambitions of cracking America, this would be the turning point.

Walls would tumble, issues would be resolved and a happy ending would appear on the horizon.

This isn’t that kind of film. “Well, there’s nothing we can do about it now,” replies Coulson, her voice beginning to crack. As she turns to face the North Sea, Peake delivers a pained smile and director Adrian Shergold leaves it there.

No tears are shed on screen but you might hear the odd sniffle from the row behind you. To call screenwriter Tony Pitts a master of English understatement would be, well, an understatement.

But the Sheffield-born actor knows that brutal honesty hits far harder than soaring scores or schmaltzy endings. Funny Cow is a funny film in both senses of the word.

Pitts has an eye for the ridiculous – and an ear for the well-honed gag – but his wildly ambitious script is also “funny peculiar”. On paper this sounds like another uplifting, Northern, rag-to-riches tale – a stand-up Billy Elliot or Educating Rita – but Pitts isn’t interested in repeating winning formulas. We never get a feeling that fame will solve our heroine’s problems.

To her, comedy is just something she does. Fulfilment, you suspect, is for softies from the South. Weirdly, she seems happier as an abused 1950s child or battered 1960s wife than a famous 1980s entertainer.

Shergold, with help from a talented art department, expertly scrambles those decades together. As a child (a deceptively sweet Macy Shackleton) we see her develop a line in anarchic comedy as she wisecracks her father after a brutal beating.

In the 1970s she leaves her short-tempered husband (played menacingly by Pitts) for Paddy Considine’s hilariously pretentious bookshop owner. He doesn’t quite cut it either. It’s only when she comes across Alun Armstrong’s club comedian that she begins to sense her destiny. With timing like his, you can hardly blame her.

We see Armstrong dying magnificently on stage (“Give the poor bastard a chance!” pleads the late Bobby Knutt’s compere), despite resuscitating some gloriously pungent old jokes.

The note-perfect re-creation of Northern working men’s clubs also allows for a funny Vic Reeves cameo and a soulful duet from Corinne Bailey Rae and Richard Hawley, who also provides the film’s achingly beautiful soundtrack.

Some of the laughs are more uncomfortable than others. Pitts, a typically awkward Yorkshireman, refuses to sugarcoat the racism and homophobia of the period.

The jokes that make Funny Cow a hit in the 1970s would land her in court now but Peake’s brutally honest performance keeps us onside.

Funny Cow is a class act; fiercely performed, smartly written, sensitively directed, wonderfully scored.

But it’s the bitter tang of authenticity that stays with you.