Duane Hopkins’ extraordinary feature debut is set among stifled, stricken lives, but ultimately its intertwined stories are statements of hope. Its disarming power rests in its exacting, compassionate attention to the emotional lives of apparently insignificant characters; those very figures that customarily only make it into the movies as set-dressing – to assert a social point or disrupt the best-laid plans of a more respectable protagonist – in this case take centre stage. The network of romances that form the film’s plot include a schoolgirl tormented by a jealous ex-boyfriend, an elderly husband and wife whose relationship remains clouded by her long-past indiscretion and a couple whose idyll is constantly threatened by their shared weakness for hard drugs.

Hopkins’ characters have painful priorities not normally brought to the fore in film narratives. One girl is too nervous and depressed to leave her house, and lives through books alone; another keeps an anxious tally of which friends have graduated from simply smoking heroin to injecting it. But these bleaker elements are played as the everyday sorrows they are, and are neither glamorised nor judged. What’s emphasised in Hopkins’ film – thanks to a focused, empathetic humanity that recalls the post-war Italian neo-realist school – is the fact that every “dysfunctional” action has a real emotional context: unrequited love is agony even if you’re an inarticulate teenage yob; unfaithfulness still burns when you’re a sweet old man; dead smackheads are mourned with no less intensity than dead “decent” people.

However, class isn’t the unifying factor here: rather, the film relates to its characters through their struggles to sustain self-respect and hope. Though subdued and sometimes tragic, Better Things is never cynical: when a character finds his or her voice, whether to protest an injustice or forgive one, it is a transcendent moment. Lol Crawley’s stunning cinematography, marked by precise framing and poetic use of landscapes and faces, further distinguishes a profoundly moving work of film art.