A Street Cat Named Bob review: the cat gets the cream of the jest

Heed a remarkable story of a remarkable man. We'll get to James Bowen in a moment. Now 71, Roger Spotiswoode began his career editing Straw Dogs and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid for Sam Peckinpah. He went on to make the excellent Under Fire and Pierce Brosnan's second Bond film. Now he's directing a film about a cat who helped rescue an English drug user. It's better than we had a right to expect.

A Street Cat Named Bob tells us how Bowen, a mild-mannered Londoner, became homeless after falling out with his family in the late 1990s. A long period as a heroin user followed before he was persuaded to try a methadone programme.

It was at this stage, living in supported housing, that he encountered a friendly ginger stray. The cat became a regular companion on his busking expeditions to Covent Garden and James credits the animal with encouraging him to get clean. A subsequent memoir lifted him from poverty.

There are occasional moments where we feel the film-makers straining to fill up space. Luke Treadaway, convincingly fidgety as Bowen, spends a lot of time explaining the plot to the patient Bob. A visual flourish that gives us a cat’s eye view is dropped almost as quickly as it is picked up.

This, nonetheless, remains a film that only a complete rotter could hate. Spotiswoode and his writers sensibly make no attempt to anthropomorphise their animal star. Played with convincing feline loftiness by the real Bob, the cat locates no children in wells nor foils any bank robbers.

He exists as a steady presence that provides James with an emotional anchor during his most trying times. Nobody should expect a socio-economic analysis of the homelessness crisis, but the picture is properly compassionate about James and his fellow rough sleepers.

It will, in these territories, almost certainly provide Spottiswoode with his biggest hit since Tomorrow Never Dies. It could even do better than that.