"I never even got to say goodbye," Poppy says cheerily after emerging from a bookstore whose clerk she teases for being obscenely glum, discovering her bicycle has been snatched. She doesn't flinch, at least not in the way one expects, and neither do her friends when she whips out a pair of chicken cutlets from her bra after a night of dancing, casually announcing how she likes the feel of the raw meat against her breasts. This gangly brunette is bananas, and the music on the soundtrack is perfectly in sync with her kooky mode of social expression, so that she suggests Mary Pickford as well as Polly Jean Harvey. Through lithe use of music and visual movement, director Mike Leigh engages silent-movie idiom for a study of human behavior that appears out of sync with the times but shouldn't really, and as memorably performed by Sally Hawkins using an arsenal of unbelievably orchestrated sniggers and jostles and punctuating guffaws, this wild child emerges as an example of humane perseverance.  Ed Gonzalez