The British filmmaker Clio Barnard is capable of a rare kind of enchanted realism, as anyone who’s seen her best film, 2013’s shattering childhood fable The Selfish Giant, will know. Her touch with actors of all ages remains sure; her use of the West Yorkshire landscape gives her work a distinctively personal stamp.

It’s hard to know, in a good way, who the likeliest heroes in Barnard’s cinema might be, out of all the candidates she could dream up. Ali & Ava revels in an unlikely but plausible pairing: it’s about two people, romantically entwined in a way that shocks onlookers and surprises them both, who suddenly find themselves at the centre of their own film. 

One is Ali (Adeel Akhtar), a chirpy landlord in Bradford, whose marriage to Runa (excellent Ellora Torchia) has broken down irretrievably after a miscarriage. To keep up appearances, they’re both still living together, and their families go on pretending nothing has changed.

The other is Ava (Claire Rushbrook), a single, white classroom assistant who’s a decade Ali’s senior, but still quite young to be a grandma five times over. Her children assume she’s past it, romantically speaking, but we can tell she’s very lonely, and when Ali, with all his impish sidelong banter, pays her some interest, she allows herself to hope there might be some kind of spark.

Barnard has been compared almost relentlessly in the past with Ken Loach. Ali & Ava fits that mould to a fault, because of the way it resembles Loach’s Glasgow-set love story Ae Fond Kiss (2004). Characters wrestle in the same way with tradition and family prejudice. Ava’s youngest son Callum (Shaun Thomas, a great discovery of Barnard’s from The Selfish Giant) is only one generation removed from National Front bigotry, and has the paraphernalia in his bedroom to prove it. 

There’s a version of the film which might have taken a starker dramatic turn, but Barnard demurs, reaching for an optimistic view of how the sins of fathers could be laid to rest. When Callum drives Ali out of his family living room by brandishing a sword, this absurd, near-mock-heroic gesture is the film’s least commonplace moment, but also, in a funny way, its most credible.

As much as they might protest they’ve got quite enough on their respective plates, Ali & Ava too often feels like two characters in search of a story. Along with being Bradford’s friendliest landlord, who even helps out with his tenants’ school runs, Ali’s a DJ to boot; he and Ava bond despite barely a wisp of overlap in their music taste.

The film reaches for songs way too much as a crutch: when the volume comes up, everyone on screen starts vibing and jiving, or jumping up on sofas for another blissed-out montage. The tactic is over-ingratiating and also a shortcut, as if we’re skipping over sketches for scenes that didn’t quite pan out.

Whether or not they’ve seen Barnard’s earlier work, most viewers will get on okay with Ali & Ava, which has moments of passing beauty in Ole Bratt Birkeland’s cinematography, of blurred lights through rain on ambient night drives.

Just as many, I think, will feel guilty for not liking it more. The performances command respect, even when the script is caught feeding characters stock laugh lines you don’t quite believe, or seeming to fumble (or compress?) whole subplots to duck away from the melodrama it might otherwise have become. 

Akhtar, a Bafta nominee for this, has considerable charm and a hangdog melancholy lurking beneath. The awkward pain of his scenes with Torchia’s character, neither of them fully able to let go, builds to an understated poignancy near the end. Rushbrook, meanwhile, is great at suggesting a shield Ava has put up over the years, an emotional buffer zone that functions like an anaesthetic. This pair look ready to take the plunge, but Ali & Ava stays put at its own, too-cautious remove.

15 cert, 94 min. In cinemas now