Currently available on DVD: "Looking for Eric"

There are two Erics in Looking for Eric. One is Eric Bishop (Steve Evets), a middle-aged Manchester, England, postal worker whose existence has been a chronicle of hardship and disappointment, much of it self-inflicted. We first see him driving the wrong way around a traffic circle, as if trying to outrun decades of accumulated anxiety. The inevitable accident is almost redundant, since he was already pretty much a wreck.

Eric lives in a messy house with two teenage stepsons (Gerard Kearns and Stefan Gumbs) who seem to be en route from ordinary adolescent sullenness to outright criminality. He also has an infant granddaughter and a grown-up daughter (Lucy-Jo Hudson), whose mother, Lily (Stephanie Bishop), he abandoned many years before, but who is enough of a presence in Eric’s life to keep him in a perpetual state of guilt.

Once upon a time, he was young and handsome, a gifted dancer full of potential. (He met Lily at a dance contest glimpsed in lyrical flashbacks.) Now he is angry, stressed out and miserable, in spite of his friends’ efforts to cheer him up with jokes and self-help exercises.

The other Eric, who becomes this Eric’s confidant and guru (though he is also a hallucination), is Eric Cantona, the real-life former star of the Manchester United soccer team. Cantona, an executive producer of this film (directed by Ken Loach from a script by Paul Laverty), was, at least on the strength of the movie’s own testimony, the greatest center forward ever. Evidence for this is provided by clips showing some of his memorable goals, and also by the adulation expressed by Eric and his pals at the post office, for whom football is both a great cause and a steady source of consolation.

Cantona shows up from time to time in Eric’s bedroom, where the two men drink wine, smoke a little grass and exchange philosophical insights.

“We always have more choices than we think,” the footballer observes. “You must always trust your teammates.”

The sentimentality of these scenes is undercut by their frank, understated absurdity, and by the way Evets, a nimble and instinctive actor, slides back and forth between incredulity and shrugging acceptance of his famous, imaginary friend’s presence.

And since this is a Ken Loach film, there is plenty of grit and working-class stoicism, and also the hovering threat of violence and repressive state power. Loach is a proud and passionate old-school British leftist, but the recent films he has done with Laverty display a gratifyingly flinty conservatism, both aesthetic and cultural.

He is grumpy about much of the modern world — the nihilism of youth culture in particular — and also committed to formal and visual traditionalism. But the clarity of his view of the world, and his absolute mastery of cinematic storytelling, endows films like Sweet Sixteen and The Wind That Shakes the Barley with an authoritative feeling of solidity and coherence.

Loach’s touch is a bit lighter here. Sweet Sixteen is a coming-of-age story shot through the lens of social tragedy, while The Wind That Shakes the Barley is an epic of historical disaster. Looking for Eric is, by comparison, gentle and sweet and often very funny. The filmmakers recruited a squad of fleshy, foul-mouthed Manchester comedians to play Eric’s mates, whose easy camaraderie and shared passion for the United team make them embodiments of the class solidarity that is Loach’s main (or possibly only) source of hope. They are also genuinely hilarious, especially Meatballs (John Henshaw), whose down-to-earth good sense backs up Cantona’s loftier wisdom.

And the film’s riotous climax deftly turns grim social realism into action-slapstick revenge farce. Not something Loach has tried before, and something he turns out to do rather well.