My stepmother introduced me to the films of Mike Leigh. Her unparalleled cool credentials include a solo trip across Asia, wearing real kohl on her eyelids and being a fan of the Pixies for longer than and wearing punkier black clothing than me, so it was a real head-scratcher when she turned on this film that starts out with a cheery lady leading a classroom of little girls in impromptu dances and exercise as schmaltzy music cheers about “happy holidays.” Tilted letters, usually used to indicate candid camera shows or baby blocks, spelled out “Life is Sweet” on the screen. What the?

Bringing Dad the pineapple. I must have this in poster size.

The 1991 satire about a working-class British family and social network was instantly one of my favorites of all time. It follows the cheery lady home, to — among others — a husband who dreams of striking it rich with a fast-food roach coach, a snarling, bulimic, anti-capitalist daughter (the supremely underrated Jane Horrocks, indistinguishable from her other star role in “Little Voice,”) and a pitiful friend who’s just opened a restaurant so artsy it includes housepet taxidermy and being named after an Edith Piaf lyric.

Moving south from writer-directer Leigh’s version of suburban North London in “Life is Sweet” is his version of central London, King’s Cross, in “High Hopes.” Sardonic and sweet, it’s also populated by characters ranging from lovably dopey — like the main characters, mid-30s Cyril Bender and Shirley, scruffy hash-smokers who are torn by the idea of raising a child in Thatcher’s 80s — to nails on-chalkboard suburbanites and yuppies. Those include falsetto-giggling Valerie (Cyril’s sister), an aspiring yuppie in multi-layer mauve power suits and their mom’s uber-yuppie neighbors, Rupert and Laeticia Booth-Brain, all furs and bow ties and Harrods bags and criminally trendy triangle-studded pill-box hats.

Like “Life is Sweet,” “High Hopes” deals with the uneasy truce people make in their lives when they’ve realized their parents probably shouldn’t have become parents. Cyril and Shirley are the only kind presences in the slowly deteriorating life of the widowed Mrs. Bender, a shut-in who hasn’t seen the cityscape of London in ages. Shirley, like the mother figure in “Life is Sweet,” longs to put her hopes into the sweet innocence of a new life. But Cyril, probably in part because the woman who gave him life seems to be completely drained of it and longing for death, can’t quite quash the guiltiness he’d feel in participating in that act.

The best part about “High Hopes” is the couples. Valerie and her “jerk in a Merc” husband are museum-quality, mint badness, with a decorative lucite chess set (the pieces are in the wrong arrangement) to boot. “You start,” she whispers in one scene to the half-asleep schlub, splaying her arms across the gold-plated headrest and diagonal pink wallpaper. “Start what?” he mutters. “You’re Michael Douglas—” she coos. “Who’s Michael Douglas?” he grunts. “—and I’m a virgin,” she murmurs, prompting a tremendous guffaw from her hubby. Their ridiculousness is obvious to Cyril and Shirley, possibly the most real couple ever imagined on screen, who still get a thrill out of kissing each other on the couch in unshapely, unsexy sweaters. The traditional romantic treatment would invariably play Cyril as the bad guy and introduce some stud with a valiant chin and virile sperm to

sweep Shirley off her feet. Instead, the audience can’t help but feel curled up with both of them, no matter how immature and idealistic. Cyril steals a gold-plated banana from a bowl full of such fruit at

his sister’s house, then sneaks up on Shirley later. You get the idea.

After taking in Wayne, a lost, naive job-seeker from Surrey, they put him up in a spare room with a tiny boom box to listen to as he falls asleep. From the other side of the wall, Cyril and Shirley giggle to each other in whispered parental caricatures: “Wayne! You turn that music down!” “You think this is a bleedin’ discotheque?” After one irritating interaction with his brother-in-law, Cyril and Shirley

exchange a look, and she shuffles to him, grinning, lightly bonking her forehead with his in empathy. In one scene, they visit Marx’s tomb, where Shirley notes that even he had children. “The philosophers have always interpreted the world, the point is to change it,” she reads from his tomb. The seriousness and double meaning is broken as she skips down the Highgate path. “Oh look! It’s the chairman of the South African Communist party!” she calls out.

Most movies can’t get right even one of the multitude of things Mike Leigh nails: class warfare, social climbing, and especially a particular, working-class dissatisfaction with the world that

nonetheless doesn’t cripple one from getting up each morning and giving it one’s best shot — whether as motorcrycle delivery man, like Cyril (riding down a skyscraper elevator in silent contempt at the two identically power-suited women in front of him) or as Andy in “Life is Sweet,” banging about and grinning in his rusty, greasy, hot dog caravan. Leigh taps in to the kind of real love and ambition that might not ever get you anywhere but to intermittent joy, which is more than one can say for most people. Plenty of couples have babies. Few of them have what Shirley and Cyril have.

So thanks, Maxine. I’ll never be able to repay the cinematic debt — at least not until you and Dad are willing to try watching my favorite movie again.

Ashley O’Dell reviews movies that aren’t in the theater anymore. She lives in North Hollywood, and yes this is another reference to Lebowski.