The most remarkable thing about Shane Meadows’s Somers Town is the way it consistently confounds expectation.

At a time when many films are inordinately bloated, this tale of friendship between a Nottingham runaway and a lonely expat Pole comes in at a trim 72 minutes. Previously known for his fierce no-budget individualism and loyalty to his native Midlands, Meadows accepted £500,000 from Eurostar to make a film in the unlovely blocks and backstreets near the shiny St Pancras terminal. The setting, the subject matter and the black-and-white cinematography of Somers Town prepare you for grit and grime but the film sweetly hymns the potential for affection among the diverse waifs drawn to the capital.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised to find that Meadows, often credited with a gloomily violent view of the world, should turn out to be an optimist. After all, his last film, This Is England, suggested that the vast majority of Eighties skinheads were charming, nurturing folk.

If anything, though, this makes Meadows all the more radical. I found it refreshing to see a film such as Somers Town which finds the potential for small happiness in hard lives. Just as I found it refreshing to see a work of art that actually reflects this city’s diversity, rather than paying mere lip service to it. When did we last see a London film with predominantly working-class characters? Or, for that matter, one in which large chunks of the dialogue are in Polish?

So I don’t really care where Meadows got his budget, or that his film runs less than half the duration of The Dark Knight. Like Shameless and Doctor Who on the small screen, Somers Town challenges the assumption that lives lived on council estates must be unrelentingly depressing, that cheap and simple pleasures — like drinking wine with a mate in a children’s playground — are any less pleasurable for being cheap and simple.

Many critics regarded the film’s possibly imaginary coda, in which Tomo (Thomas Turgoose) and Marek (Piotr Jagiello) are reunited in Paris, in Technicolor, with the French waitress they both worship, as a sugar-coated happy ending. I think it’s there as an ironic counterpoint to the real happiness of two different and displaced lads who find a kind of kinship in London.