A down-and-out former pop star receives an invitation to a remote English island to perform a greatest hits concert from his time as part of an extremely successful folk duo.

A simple enough premise, and could describe anything from a comedy to a horror movie. (It resembles, e.g., The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent.)

It’s fair to call The Ballad of Wallis Island a comedy, though there’s no question the comedy is a vehicle for a poignant drama. You can only get to Wallis Island on a ferry—a guy rowing a boat a couple of times a day if he feels like it—and when Herb McGwyer arrives, he ends up dumped in the water.

He’s already grumpy: He doesn’t want to do the old music, but he needs the money to do his latest album, a series of collaborations of with other artists. Since his breakup with Nell, he’s been on the lookout for a new partnership.

Or has he just been looking for the old one?

Nell Mortimer has moved on—like, to America, where’s she’s remarried and in a struggling business with her husband. So when reclusive millionaire Charles Heath offers her some money to perform, she takes him up on it.

But Charles didn’t tell Herb that Nell was coming.

You get the setup. It’s wall-to-wall remote-island-jokes and socially-awkward-fan humor, as Charles walks Herb through his eccentric life and obsession with McGwyer/Mortimer, inflamed as it is by the death of his own wife, who shared his love of the music.

This kind of thing isn’t easy to do well: Charles has to be kind of clueless, awkward and still likable. Tim Key (as Charles) manages to be the sort of person who talks constantly about meaningless things and carries his cluelessness to the point of dishonesty, yet still be very likable.

One gag has Herb demanding to know what Charles made his money on, as he would not perform for a—I forget what, an arms dealer or slave trader or something—only to discover that Charles won the lottery. And then to find out that Charles and his buddies blew all the money on following bands around the globe on their world tours. Only to come back home and win the lottery again.

Tom Basden also has a tricky job as Herb, the prickly jerk of a musician holding a torch and a grudge over a decade, inflamed by the sense of “selling out”. He’s really the main character of the movie: His character arc is the one that powers the story and has to occur for us to feel like something good has happened.

This may be the key element of the film’s charm. Yes, it’s well written, well acted, with good music (though not all that much for a movie about a folk duo), and the characters feel like people rather than props. But it very much also doesn’t want to make you feel bad. It manages good dramatic lifts and falls without trying to submerse you in despair.

You end up rooting for everyone—except maybe Nell’s husband who turns out to be kind of superficial jerk. But even he can be viewed through an (understandable) lens of feeling threatened by the Herb & Nell romance of the past.

It never forgets the value of humor in telling a story that has a fair amount of tragedy in it (as does all life).

The ending is not “fairytale” but it’s happy. We end up feeling good about Herb and Charles, both who they are and where they’re going in life.

It’s such a simple thing, you’d think they’d make more of them. But simple isn’t the same as easy.