Some movies just shouldn’t work. They should, if you strip them down to their constituent elements, be run of the mill stories which flow along predictable narrative lines. There are many movies which do that; only a few have a plot that’s entirely predictable but still manage to engage and move. We’ve had a few of those in recent times – take Zero Dark Thirty or Argo, both of which had entirely predictable narratives which still more than kept the attention. Silver Linings Playbook is another.

At its heart it’s a conventional romantic comedy based on a popular novel. Bradley Cooper is a teacher returning from a stint in a mental health facility having been diagnosed with bipolar disorder; we find out early on this was precipitated by his violent assault on the man his wife was having an affair with. His marriage was on the rocks; he comes out and forms a friendship with Jennifer Lawrence’s young widow, a woman who on losing her husband had slept with every one of her co-workers. She agrees to help him reconnect with his wife if he’ll help her out by learning to dance and dance with her in a competition she’d always wanted to enter.

From a bare description you know where this is headed. There’s not a single plot-spolier there, but you can fill in the blanks.  There’s so much to like here, though. You know already about the performances. Bradley Cooper is playing an awards-fodder role, but he still does it well. Jennifer Lawrence is simply superb – again. In her young career she’s showed star-power and variety in the roles she’ll take on. Her’s is a necessarily more still performance, low-key to Cooper’s major, but holds the film together. As a woman who dances to heal and express herself, it’s a role fraught with the danger of cliché or the dreaded ‘life-lessons’; her awards are richly deserved because you simply believe her. She’s going to have a special career if she keeps choosing roles with the wisdom she has done.

What I really liked, though, is the earthiness of the presentation of mental illness.When you’re suffering, when you’re in the depths of depression, when the black dog is barking and snarling and foaming at the mouth; when it’s like that, sometimes it’s all you can do to put one foot in front of the other. The film revolves around the achievement of some things are desperately ordinary - watching a game with the family; getting an average score, getting to have a conversation with someone you love. None of these are major, but for those under dark clouds they’re the defining thing, the summit to scale. In showing believable, ordinary people and families struggling just to get to normality, the film does a great service. To do so - and lovingly, gently point out the irrational coping mechanisms of the so-called un-afflicted along the way - removes stigma, enhances understanding and does so with a smile and a knowing glance. All that in a conventional romantic comedy. Sometimes the best thing you can do is to a simple thing well.