Black Moun­tain Poets

With­out mean­ing to undu­ly dec­i­mate some of the sup­port­ing per­for­mances in Jamie Adams’ sweet, impro­vised com­e­dy Black Moun­tain Poets, watch­ing this film is a sim­ple case of wait­ing for Alice Lowe to appear on screen. If every­one in the cast gives a sol­id sev­en out of 10, she’s eas­i­ly a 12. The cam­era nat­u­ral­ly grav­i­tates towards her, wise to the fact that her reac­tion to a line of dia­logue will like­ly be fun­nier than the dia­logue itself. She’s hilar­i­ous, casu­al­ly out­class­ing her fel­low play­ers. Even the way she wears a hat is amusing.

She stars as Lisa, wacky, impul­sive sis­ter to Dol­ly Wells’ anx­i­ety-prone Claire. The pair get them­selves into a spot of both­er when they’re caught try­ing to steal a JCB dig­ger. By sheer luck, their per­fect get­away is helped when they spot an aban­doned hatch­back which hap­pens to be owned by sib­ling poet celebri­ties the Wild­ing sis­ters, who are en route to an out­door poet­ry slam in their hon­our. And so Claire and Lisa do the obvi­ous thing and assume their iden­ti­ties, believ­ing that a week­end of improv poet­ry is prob­a­bly far supe­ri­or to a week­end in the slam­mer. And from then on, it goes as it goes…

There’s a nice dove­tail­ing of form and con­tent in choos­ing to make an impro­vised film about impro­vised poet­ry. And there are ample tit­ters along the way, but there is a tad too much corps­ing, or stretch­es where actors sim­ply attempt to dia­tribe their way towards a gold­en gag which some­times doesn’t come. When the film dis­pens­es with its pet­ty crime sto­ry (about 30 min­utes in), it begins to lose its steam, par­tic­u­lar­ly with the intro­duc­tion of poet diva Louise Cabaye (Rosa Rob­son) and her strained rela­tion­ship with hot sen­si­tive dude Richard (Tom Cullen).

The laughs dry up and in their place come maudlin longueurs as the var­i­ous char­ac­ters take this trag­ic mini-break as an oppor­tu­ni­ty to weigh up their human fail­ings. In its blind search for pro­fun­di­ty, it’s a film which los­es sight of what makes it inter­est­ing in the first place.