“Nice start to the day: biscuits and a sugar mummy.” So says Hector McAdam (Peter Mullan) to a kind-hearted café worker, who has just given him a free cup of tea and biscuits in the opening scene of Jake Gavin’s directorial debut. HECTOR is a heart-warming, road movie-cum-drama that focuses on the plight of homelessness in twenty-first century Britain, and manages to feel neither patronising nor preachy towards the subject or viewer of the film.

With his bright orange, hi-vis jacket and bushy, white beard, Mullan looks every part the homeless wanderer as he navigates the motorways and B-roads of Britain. He traverses the western spine of mainland UK through the course of the film, from Glasgow, through Newcastle and then Liverpool, down to London. The migratory, transient nature of homelessness is addressed through the initial grouping of Hector and his two friends: Hazel (Natalie Gavin) and Dougie (Laurie Ventry).

Any good road movie needs a strong pairing of friends to complete their journey alongside each other, and these “three lollipop men of the apocalypse” (in Dougie’s words) display a spark and humour in their conversation which quickly normalises the narrative set-up of the film – HECTOR sits somewhere in its treatment of homelessness between the earnest, socialist realist nature of Ken Loach’s CATHY COME HOME and the enjoyable drama of Robin Williams as Parry in Terry Gilliam’s THE FISHER KING. Tonally, Mullan’s depiction of a down-and-out man is closer to the performative nature of musician Seasick Steve – only minus the musicality of Steven Wold’s hobo blues creation.

“three lollipop men of the apocalypse”

The landscape that DoP David Readecker captures is a heady mixture of rural and urban – picture the wide, barren beauty of shots in Jonathan Glazer’s UNDER THE SKIN, but instead of a motorbike, our protagonist limps, sleet and wind-battered, along the Scottish hillsides, eyeing up the next passing van as a means to venture south on his annual journey to a London hostel in time for Christmas. There’s something colder, though, about the inner cities of Liverpool and London, with their incessant traffic and exposed concrete overpasses – not designed for an elderly man to be shuffling through in the bleak midwinter. The darkness is lifted in part by the original soundtrack from composer Emily Barker, an Australian songwriter now based in London, who ignores the obvious bagpipe-driven route that a film with a Scottish lead actor could edge towards, and instead creates a soundscape influence by the slide-guitar and violin harmonies of Americana music. Its warmth and toe-bopping nature counterbalances well with a lot of the chilled imagery on screen and helps lift the narrative out of any melancholy holes it could easily slip into with the subject matter.

One of the great things about Peter Mullan is that he’s a British actor with whom it’s very easy to imagine having a pint with at the end of a performance – he’s likeable and yet also carries an air of gravitas. From TRAINSPOTTING to TYRANNOSAUR and back again with SUNSHINE ON LEITH, he’s shown himself more than capable of portraying a variety of different roles on screen. In HECTOR, we see him in the good company of a supporting cast that includes Keith Allen, Gina McKee, and Stephen Tompkinson, and thoroughly able, through the direction of Jake Gavin, to humanise and endear us to the plight of a vulnerable section of our society, whose story is told with care, compassion, and a carefully-placed smattering of tender humour.