Mike Leigh's Poppy is on a happy pill that, unfortunately, doesn't wear off Happy-Go-Lucky (15) dir: Mike Leigh

Audiences searching for substance or a storyline in Mike Leigh's slight new film may feel like Hans Blix on the trail of weapons of mass destruction. Happy-Go-Lucky is made up of curious, unformed episodes; I suspect that we are meant to view it as an English cousin to the television adaptation of Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City - glimpsed on-screen, though not nearly as addictive.

It is a loose character study of Poppy (Sally Hawkins), a maniacally chirpy London schoolteacher. We see her clubbing with friends and drinking with colleagues. She visits her pregnant sister. She starts dating someone she meets at work. And she learns to drive under the tutelage of Scott (Eddie Marsan), an instructor so uptight and seething that any reasonable person would look forward to the emergency stop for a moment of blessed calm.

How you respond to Happy- Go-Lucky depends largely on your tolerance for Poppy, played with floodlit brightness. (This is Leigh's first widescreen picture: did he feel she was too extravagant a creation to be contained by a conventional frame?) Poppy dresses like an explosion in a Dulux factory and wears so many bangles that when she moves it sounds like a riot in a cutlery drawer. Difficulty and inconvenience only kindle her cheeriness. This is a woman who responds with a raucous laugh to each jolt of pain during a physio examination. When her bicycle is stolen, she chuckles: "I didn't even get a chance to say goodbye!" (If the hero of Bicycle Thieves had had the same attitude, the history of Italian neorealism would have been awfully different.)

Poppy couldn't have any more bounce if she attended trampoline classes. Oh, hang on - she does. That is typical Leigh: balancing another few cherries on a cake already heaving under the weight of decoration. Her demeanour is established during the opening credits, when she cycles through London, waving at passers-by and doing everything short of chatting with Mr Bluebird on her shoulder. Her earrings alone provide a miniature lesson in defining a character through accessories - from dainty yellow chicks to giant hoops that small Victorian children might chase down the street with sticks.

Each zany detail feels like another exhibit in some imagined case for the defence. And still I don't think we really get to know her. In Secrets and Lies, downtrodden Cynthia (Brenda Blethyn) kept sighing: "You gotta laugh, sweet'art, else you'd cry." But we never discover what, if anything, lies behind Poppy's insistent mirth.

This has the regrettable effect of making you long for something unpleasant to befall her, just to see whether it will force her at last to take a breath between words or reveal herself in some way. The closest we get is a kind of compare-and-contrast game between herself and Scott. Poppy encourages her pupils to flap noisily around the room pretending to be birds; Scott can't protect his students from his own corrosive fear of the world during a simple driving lesson. The film is at its subtlest when Leigh suggests an interesting correlation between the instructor and an aggressive child in Poppy's class, encouraging us to view the boy as a prototypical Scott. Poppy is in a unique position to help the child before it's too late, but the question is whether her driving instructor is too set in his rancid ways to respond to similar intervention.

Advance word (not to mention the title's unsubtle hint) suggested this film would show a chirpier Leigh than the man behind Vera Drake and All or Nothing. But the most superficially upbeat parts - Poppy larking around with her chums or trading nonsensical small talk on a first date - are the least convincing, as cosmetically wacky in tone as 1993's Naked was artificially doom-laden. Where the film does develop its own inner life is in those lingering moments that can't quite be categorised, such as Poppy's encounter with a tramp (Stanley Townsend), a deliberate dead ringer for Michel Simon in Boudu Saved from Drowning. Here is a character with promise. Poppy, on the other hand, is a pleasant enough lass, but two hours in her company is pushing it.

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