Sound of metal: "Tuner"

While the hip young cinekids rally around their preferred online creators, Tuner is being offered as the seniors' special in the screen next door. Here is an old-school New York thriller such as your poppa - maybe even your grandpoppa - used to make: unsexy, unlikely to go viral in the way Backrooms and Obsession have, such a throwback that it features Dustin Hoffman in a leading role. Emergent cherub Leo Woodall, from Nuremberg and the last Bridget Jones, is Niki, a workaday piano tuner with an extraordinary gift: a sensitivity of hearing such that he can also crack safes with the right equipment to hand. Hoffman is his legitimate employer, with whom our boy spends his afternoon bickering as they wend from one chichi residence to the next; Havana Rose Liu is the piano student Niki impresses with his perfect pitch in a scene that recalls what Hoffman was doing with playing cards back in Rain Man, itself now approaching its fortieth anniversary; and Lior Raz is the heavy who makes Niki an offer he feels he cannot refuse after his mentor gets in a financial jam. As if Tuner couldn't be any less cutting-edge, it's pursuing a very old plot - the kid who gets in up to his (in this instance, ultra-delicate) ears - of a kind that might well have been the basis of a poverty-row noir fashioned seventy-odd years ago, a comparison the film appears to welcome, given the copious jazz and blues standards on its soundtrack.

The director is recent Oscar-winner Daniel Roher (who also co-writes with Robert Ramsey), and you could probably drive yourself crazy wondering what the new film has in common with his documentary Navalny. (Most likely scenario: Roher took a meeting the day after his Oscar win, the suits asked him what he wanted to do next, and he suggested something light and fictional.) Some large part of Tuner - actually, its strongest part - does, however, function as a kind of character study, gradually drawing out, as a documentarist might well seek to draw out, the protagonist's personality, belief system, strengths, weaknesses and red lines. This is easily the best showcase yet for Woodall, who exudes something of the young Ryan Gosling's sleepy, shuffling chill from within a snug hoodie, and gets to play diverse duets with each of his co-stars: sparring with gramps Hoffman, flirting awkwardly with Liu, gulping before Raz, and having his hair ruffled by Tovah Feldshuh as Hoffman's wife. One big giveaway that Tuner is an oldtimers' movie at heart: it's not unduly fussed about instant gratification, instead letting all the above relationships build and simmer. 

What thrills there are here remain defiantly analogue: occasional setpieces, made in the editing suite, in which Woodall is set to twiddling a knob against the clock while The Zone of Interest sound designer Johnnie Burn turns circles to discern exactly when a pin drops and the mechanisms click. Here, as elsewhere, the movie is revealed as less concerned with worldbuilding or statement-making than it is with tinkering. Much as these characters are bothered by niggly little things (loud noises, the coda to a piano concerto), so those behind the camera find ways to nudge this narrative on (as with a mid-film, very old-school montage) or set themselves technical tasks to accomplish (Burn, for his part, engineers a couple of wrenchingly violent sound cuts late on). It's neither as spectacular nor as zeitgeisty as what's on in the screen next door, and arguably too mechanical in its closing reels: here, Roher starts to force his plot, where previously he was content to tease out developments. (That noisome crunching you can hear is a clunky gear change or two.) A note-perfect ending, however, should help you forgive some of its flaws - and any truly healthy cinema needs its mechanics and tinkerers as much as it needs its artists and visionaries.

Tuner is now showing in selected cinemas.