Mike Leigh's latest movie is nothing like Vera Drake. It's a lighter, less obviously significant piece.

But this comedy, set among the ordinary working-class Londoners Leigh knows so well, is no less observant of human frailties and once again contains performances as memorable as those of most of his films.

The central character, beautifully played by Sally Hawkins, is Poppy, a cheerful primary school teacher who won't let anyone or anything get her down and is fine with the fact that her love life is non-existent for the moment. She's fun to be with but also capable of seeming a little too much of a good thing.

Determined, after her bicycle has been stolen, to learn to drive, she finds herself matched with Eddie Marsan's driving instructor who is everything she is not.

He's neurotically hooked on teaching her the precise way. It's not easy. She's wearing the wrong shoes, she keeps on talking and her concentration seems totally inadequate.

He's never given up on a pupil, he says, but this happy-go-lucky example is almost too much for him.

The problem is that he finds himself falling for her at the same time. But Poppy has finally found herself a man in social worker Tim (Samuel Roukin) and, just for once, finds herself in a situation even she can't easily deal with. Marsan follows her on a trip to Margate and a confrontation ensues that leads both to think again about the course of their lives.

Upon this comparatively slender storyline, Leigh builds a portrait not just of two totally contrasting individuals, one life-loving, the other knotted up with introspection, but of London life that includes half a dozen other notable characters.

One of them is Karina Fernandez's flamenco teacher who insists to Poppy and her giggling friends that the dance class and flamenco in particular is a serious matter about passion and anger and then, remembering her own broken love life, rushes from the dance floor in tears. Then there's the married and pregnant Helen (Caroline Martin) for whom Poppy's free life seems an implicit criticism of her own.

But the centre of the film is the shifting relationship between Poppy and the driving instructor. And Marsan, inwardly at odds with himself and the world at large, is as memorable as Hawkins.

If the film may seem at first to be about nothing very much, you don't have to look far into it to see that it covers a great deal of ground about how ordinary people live their lives.

That it is vastly entertaining and often very funny as it does so is because Leigh seems incapable of making a comedy that doesn't touch the truth of things even in the smallest, seemingly insignificant of ways.

The lesson is that if there's nothing serious inside a comedy it never really works, as this director has proved many times before.