It’s taken years for actor Nick Moran to bring this biopic of gay Sixties record producer Joe Meek to the screen but it was worth the wait.

Meek was a sonic pioneer who couldn’t play a note, with a loopy belief in spiritualism and the business sense of a plank.

He created the titular hit Telstar but passed on The Beatles, wasted his heart and savings on a dim-bulb singer called Heinz, and killed himself after shooting his landlady in 1967.

This intriguing tale is told with energy, style and wit by Moran, if not quite enough depth.

Con O’Neill played Meek in Moran’s earlier stage version of the story, and renders him again here as a manic obsessive whose perfectionism tips too often into apoplectic rage. It’s a grandstanding performance, even if further clues to Meek’s personality are relegated to a couple of sentimental late soliloquies and flashbacks.

Moran is clearly an actors’ director, drawing fine supporting performances from the likes of James Corden, Ralf Little and Tom Burke, and a hilariously inappropriate cameo from Kevin Spacey as Meek’s stiff-upper-lipped business partner.

He’s also still a lad: there’s only one, sitcom-ish female character, and she gets shot.

Yet the script is very funny and well paced until, like Meek, it falls apart at the end.

Moran also captures a real sense of the period. Not just the clothes and the wallpaper in bedroom recording studios, but the clash between the new world of music and Dexedrine and the old order, founded on cups of tea and respect, that criminalised Meek’s sexuality.

It’s not the best debut by a writer/director I’ve ever seen but shows there’s much more to Moran than his Lock, Stock past.

Telstar screens tomorrow at the Genesis Cinema, Whitechapel. The London Film Festival runs until Thursday.