I’ll give God Help the Girl this much: while I can’t give it any love, it was at least able to make me feel bad for feeling that way. This is an adorable little trilling songbird of a movie, pretty and sweet. And it’s so, so earnest, sincerity radiating in waves from every frame. I found myself wanting to love it, but unable to do so.

God Help the Girl is a musical with few of the stylistic trappings one might expect of a musical. It’s like one of Jacques Demy’s musicals, but with the colorful bubblegum exuberance toned down to a folksy lull. People break out into song and dance, but the setting and characters remain firmly grounded. And the music itself is not of the Broadway ilk, but rather the indie tunes of Belle and Sebastian. This is the culmination of a longform project by the band’s frontman, Stuart Murdoch (who also wrote and directed the film), in collaboration with several different female vocalists who sing the movie’s songs, accompanied by the band.

The film’s story is less complicated than its background. Eve (Emily Browning) is a young woman undergoing treatment for anorexia in a Scottish hospital. In songwriting, she finds solace from the psychiatrists pushing her to do something with her life. She eventually breaks out and goes to Glasgow, where she meets aspiring guitarist James (Olly Alexander) and his friend Cassie (Hannah Murray). The trio form a band and seek inspiration for their songs wherever they can find it.

Whether or not you’ll enjoy God Help the Girl likely depends on how much you jibe with its songs. The music and lyrics are consistently airy and twee, pretty much embodying whatever stereotypes come to mind at the “indie” descriptor. I could dig it, but the bigger problem was that none of the songs distinguished themselves all that much to me. In the time since seeing the movie, the musical sequences have all collapsed into a samey mush of pleasant lilts and chirps. Not helping this is the film’s length. Though it may have none of the grand pretensions of a Broadway-type musical, it does have the running time, coming up just short of two hours. The middle section especially consists of overly repetitive segments of the characters bickering over their creative processes.

Like this year’s Begin Again (which I find this preferable to, at least), God Help the Girl explores music as a salve and a channel for pain. The movie sets up Eve as being in an emotionally precarious state, and lets her go to play a high-wire act of maintaining her sanity with the help of her friends and her art. Still, though, the incorporation of anorexia feels cheap, like a shorthand for “fragility” more than an honest approach to the disease. It’s not as though this needed to be a Next to Normal for the hipster set, but not one bit of Eve’s development throughout the film seems at all related to this condition she’s supposed to have.

God Help the Girl exists in a fantastical Glasgow where everyone is young and clean and impeccably dressed, a place to go out in a rowboat on a sunny afternoon to seek inspiration. It’s not clear what time it is, and it doesn’t really matter. Glasgow is a between-space for youths living the between-spaces of their lives, trying to figure out what comes next. The movie’s heart is true and its effort is laudable, but it doesn’t end up tackling these ideas in a truly satisfactory manner.

Grade: C+