Stars: Carey Mulligan, Peter Sarsgaard, Dominic Cooper, Rosamund Pike, Alfred Molina, Matthew Beard, Olivia Williams, Emma Thompson.

100 mins

THE Sixties have yet to start swinging. Life in suburbia in 1961 is pretty dull for 16-year-old schoolgirl Jenny (Carey Mulligan), who faces exams and a place at Oxford. All that changes when an older man offers her – and her cello – a lift in his car to avoid the rain.

He’s twice her age and everything the immature boys at school and her stick-in-the-mud father aren’t. Her father (Alfred Molina) succumbs to his smooth talk, agreeing that he can take Jenny to classical concerts and eventually a weekend in Paris.

Jenny is no smitten schoolgirl.

She’s intelligent enough to know what she’s doing and even tells David (Peter Sarsgaard) that she doesn’t intend to lose her virginity until she’s 17.

This is, of course, a totally unsuitable relationship, but with clever dialogue and adept acting doesn’t come over as salacious or nasty. They both do everything with impeccable manners.

Of course, David isn’t all he seems. He and his friends (flash Dominic Cooper and dumb Rosamund Pike) love drinking and late night suppers. They have expensive tastes paid for, it appears, by the two men relieving, in the nicest way, little old ladies of their valuables and indulging in Rachmann-style housing scams for immigrants.

Nick Hornby has adapted fellow writer Lynn Barber’s memoir into a film that is more than an exercise in nostalgia – although the fashions and music are seductive – but a genuinely moving account of a young girl waking up to the realities of life.

Carey Mulligan’s young looks and manner make her a completely believable 16-yearold, who knows how to get away with things that would appall her father if he knew about them.

Sarsgaard, with a convincing English accent, makes David more than a dirty old man preying on young girls, even if he neglects to mention that he’s married with children.

Cooper, who came aboard the project after Orlando Bloom ducked out at the last minute, is good as the best friend who tries to warn David about the consequences of what he’s doing. Pike, released from playing icy blondes, is a hoot as a thick blonde who doesn’t have two brain cells to rub together, and Emma Thompson has a couple of brief but telling scenes at Jenny’s headmistress.

Danish director Lone Scherfig, like Hornby perhaps not the obvious choice to helm a typically British story, does well not to wallow in nostalgia but present a realistic portrait of a teenager learning about life.