Frank and Percy review – bromance becomes romance for dog walkers Ian McKellen and Roger Allam

There is a tender sweetness to this silver-years romance of new experiences and new ideas – and also some sugary sentimentality, an autumnal woodwind score telling us how to feel, and a bit of sitcom-cartoony characterisation in the all-star gallery of supporting turns. Sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn’t. But the movie’s easy-going good nature wins out – and there’s a terrific contribution from Joanna Lumley, playing Belinda, an elegant woman poignantly suffering from early onset dementia. Screenwriter Martin Sherman adapts the two-hander stage-play by Ben Weatherill in which Roger Allam and Ian McKellen originally starred. They return here for the expanded movie version and Sean Mathias once again directs.

Allam plays Frank, a retired history teacher whose wife died of cancer a few short years ago (Belinda is his sister-in-law) and who now likes to walk his dog Toffee on Hampstead Heath. McKellen is Percy, an academic sociologist and climate scientist who can be found there too, with his dog Bruno. Percy is rather acrimoniously separated from his now ex-partner, a waspish and querulously self-pitying figure gamely played by Stephen Fry.

In their differing ways, the men are lonely; Frank has nothing to do but mope around the garden centre, brooding over memories from his marriage, and volunteering at a charity shop where he has to stand, and Derek Jacobi, as a salaried employee, is allowed to sit. Percy goes in for age-gap dates from a niche website called Papa Search – some broad comedy cameos here for Ncuti Gatwa and Hugh Skinner – but he’s not satisfied. His friendship with Frank grows, his mischievous donnish sense of fun vibing unexpectedly with Frank’s stolid northern common sense. Then one day over a drink, Percy asks if it might be quite all right if he kissed Frank. Wonderingly, Frank agrees – and it is the start of something new; he says: “I felt like I did when I had a cataract removed.”

This leads Frank to ponder if he is bisexual – but perhaps it is more that he is simply sexual, and sexual in a way that he never expected to be at this time of life, or any time of life, and could only have been with this individual person. We get some bittersweet comedy as Frank and Percy realise that their social life consists of funerals, and Percy has a startling Yorick moment looking at the churchyard’s headstones. “Oh my God! I’ve had him!”

Naturally, the course of true love, or any sort of love, does not run smooth and at one stage Belinda, in a moment of lucidity, tells Frank: “How lucky you are to have a broken heart at 77!” True enough. It’s a love story as comforting as the cups of tea and slices of cake to which the characters are partial.