If Grumpy Cat and “Keanu” haven’t sated your appetite for screen felines, try “A Street Cat Named Bob,” a savvy exercise in inspirational feel-good cinema lightly seasoned with grit. Adapted from James Bowen’s autobiography (part of a Bob franchise), the movie, directed by Roger Spottiswoode, tells how an orange cat enters the life of James (Luke Treadaway), a homeless London busker struggling with heroin addiction. Though James has a sobriety adviser (a firm Joanne Froggatt, as a persuasive living argument for public health care) who finds him housing, it is the cat, which James names Bob, who teaches him about responsibility and what it’s like to feel loved.
Trailer: ‘A Street Cat Named Bob’
James (with Bob often on his shoulder) faces obstacles, including a negligent father (Anthony Head), street ruffians and methadone withdrawal (depicted in almost cursory fashion). But fortunately he has a mildly daffy neighbor, Belle (Ruta Gedmintas), to cook him a vegetarian supper. (They’re so simpatico that at one point she wears stylized cat ears.) A gently sparkling score, and folkish songs byCharlie Fink of the band Noah and the Whale, sung by the guileless, wide-eyed Mr. Treadaway, pluck the heartstrings. “Cat cam” sequences, showing Bob’s visual perspective, have a playful whimsy. Did I mention that it’s set largely over the holidays?
When an editor discovers James’s story, book buyers applaud the budding memoirist, and he regales an appreciative street audience with song. Thank heavens for Bob, whose steady gaze and cool composure are a welcome tonic to the surrounding sentimentality.
