The plot of the film is simple. Jane plays Little Voice a young woman who lacks self confidence and whose life has been destroyed by an overbearing and grotesque mother. The mother continually belittles her daughter who is so lacking in any social sills that she sits in her room each night playing old 50's and 60's records owned by her father. It would seem that the father was also destroyed by the mother. She sings along to these records and is able to mimic such greats as Billie Holiday, Judy Garland and Marilyn Munro. (Okay Marilyn Munro was not a great but you know what I mean)

Michael Caine plays a seedy music entrepreneur who is limping along in obscurity heading career wise somewhere worse than obscurity. He has a brief drunken fling with Little Voice's mother and hears her voice coming from her room. He immediately sees her as an unexploited talent that might just bring him back into the game.

The film centres on a concert organised by Caine and its aftermath. Broadly the film is a morality tale in which the mother and Caine get what is coming to them and Little Voice is able to achieve something more than fame and that is normality.

The film is both good and bad. Horrocks at its centre is brilliant and it is her talent that is responsible for everything good about it. Her performance scenes are breathtaking made more remarkable by the use of her own voice. It is the other characters and the rest of the film that is the drag. The morality tale is rather telescoped and the character of the mother a repellent and grotesque rather than being real. The end a little bit of an anti-climax. One would imagine that this stems from the difficulty of converting the play to a film.

Never the less the performance of Horrocks is so strong and the premise so clever that the film is worth looking at despite its faults.

This movie is more than a simple comedy -- by the end, it has become emotionally wrenching, as L.V., her mother and Ray each hit their breaking point. But Bill's presence in L.V.'s life -- and, more importantly, the confidence she has gained through his friendship -- assure us that L.V. is headed for better things. Sometimes the tone is uneven; Ray's vicious attack on L.V.'s mom near the end makes the cut-downs in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" look tame, and coming after so much gentle humor, the final spiraling-out-of-control is jarring. But these scenes are so brilliantly acted that it's worth it.

Even if the rest of the movie were not as good and as memorable as it is, "Little Voice" would be worth seeing just for Horrocks' amazing vocal performance. It's almost unbelievable how brilliantly she sings in so many different styles, and after her big finale, I found myself singing "Get Happy" for weeks.

The trouble is she isn't all that interested. Her singing, in her eyes is a private, lonely affair between her and her dad. She is pushed into doing a spot at Boo's club which fails miserably as she is too shy and reluctant to perform more than momentarily. But a little careful emotional manipulation by Ray persuades her to make a real effort just once. The result is a triumph and, by the evening's end, bigshot agent Bunnie Morris is booking his train to come check her out the next night. But she never agreed to a next night and, come next night, she is simply refusing to leave her bedroom. Meanwhile, down at the club, the audience, including the important Mr Morris, are getting restless and irate as Boo desperately tries to keep them on side with rubbish act after rubbish act.

Leave her room she eventually does however and, just before the audience gives up and riots or simply leaves, another triumphant performance finally ensues. Morris is awestruck and the film ends as, her shyness forgotten, she leaves for a new life and a lucrative film contract in Beverley Hills.

OK, I lied. That last paragraph does not in fact describe how this film ends. No doubt if a big Hollywood studio had made it, it very likely would have. But happily the writers, Cartwright and Herman, have enough integrity and wisdom to realize that that way of ending the movie would be artistically unthinkable. That is the good news. The bad news is that, having had the good sense not to end the film that way, they seem a bit at a loss to find a satisfactory alternative and the ending of the film is a bit of a shambles. It's as if they'd had two or three somewhat unsatisfying ways to end it and gone for a somewhat botched mixture of all of them. So that a film that starts out quite interesting ends up just falling apart.

Ultimately then, not a success. And flawed too in other ways. In particular, LV's, with hindsight rather Harry Potter-ish, visions of her late dad, smiling and waving at her, are badly judged, weak and sentimental. But while not a success it's certainly not wholly without merit. For one thing there's the cast. Horrocks, Caine, Blethyn, Broadbent, McGregor: you can't go that far wrong with a cast like that. Caine, as always, delivers the goods as the seedy Ray (though he can't quite salvage the poorly written scene of his rather over-dramatic exit). And Broadbent is great as the even seedier Mr Boo. Best of all is Blethyn as Mari, the comic centre of the film, coarse and ghastly, like a really nasty variant on Chaucer's Wife of Bath.