Quirky comedy completely dominated by the performance of Sally Hawkins

There are few if any movies more dominated by the charm of the central character (or the performance of the lead actress) than Michale Leigh's Happy-Go-Lucky, a totally winning British comedy (2008 - I'd thought it was more recent) , in which Sally Hawkins (unknown to me till now) plays the title character, Poppy, an upbeat, energetic, spirited, eccentric 30-year-old Camden Town/London single, over the course of a few weeks of her life. Movie opens with Poppy riding a wobbly bicycle through London streets (something about the editing and soundtrack in this sequence seems Parisian); she leaves her bike, shops a bit, including a visit to a little bookstore in which she tries to make conversation with the sullen proprietor - her persistence and her good humor in the face of his indifference is a key to her character that will unfold throughout the movie - and her bike is stolen. She notes something like "Didn't even have a chance to say good-bye." This attitude is almost a little crazy, and later in the film she does take some risks, esp in reaching out to a man who seems to be schizophrenic, that are unwise, but in keeping with her unique personality.  The stolen bike is the first strand in the thin plot of the movie: Poppy thus begins to take driving lessons, and her tempestuous relationship with her instructor, a probably unbalanced and certainly racist young man, through weekly lessons, gives us a window onto how Poppy's mind works and how she confronts conflict and evil. There are a # of surprises throughout the film, which I won't give away except to say that your impression of her and her friends from the first few sequences - their night at a club and afterwords - will not prepare you for who she is and what she does with her life. The scene in which she and her flatmate visit the pregnant sister is great, as is the flamenco class, if a little over the top. While Hawkins deserves tons of credit for her great performance - which I hope won her some awards - Leigh also deserves credit for the screenplay that allowed the Poppy character to come to life - optimistic and silly and lovable brought just to the edge but not over the edge of cloying; she's someone you think you'd want to know as a friend or neighbor - but then again, in real life, maybe not - she might be just too much day after day. Leigh also kept the pace of the movie moving along very well so that, at nearly two hours, it never seemed to lag and did not seem - as so many movies do - to go on just a few scenes (or in some cases way too many scenes) too long. Leigh is an under-appreciated director, and Happy-go-Lucky, quirky though it is, is one of the best of recent comedies.