Acting cannon Timothy Spall is the lifeline of road movie The Last Bus ★★★☆☆

Tom’s wife, some seventy years ago, asked if he would take her as far as they could go. The newlyweds thus left Land’s End, in the far south west of England, to an isolated cottage with a lovely garden in John o’ Groates, the most north-eastern tip of Scotland.

The reason for their departure, and why the now very elderly Tom decides after the death of his wife to travel 1,349 kilometers back to Lands’ End via an almost endless series of bus connections, is made clear with a handful of flashbacks. As befits a road movie, in The Last Bus the exact reason for going out isn’t even that important—however tragic and disruptive the cause was.

In The Last Bus the trip mainly looks like an excuse to sketch a geographic and social cross-section of the United Kingdom in a pleasantly rippling way. With the acclaimed English actor Timothy Spall (Secrets & Lies, mr. gymnast) as glorified travel guide Tom, the film turns out to be an ode to a generation that doesn’t whine too much, represented by a man who can even understand the thief of his briefcase. Tom, a former mechanic, helps an oncoming car and his own driver in the event of a breakdown, is the only one in a crowded bus to speak out against a racist and sings beautifully sad Amazing Grace at a bus station, forcing even the most drunken bystanders to silence.

Tom is a dying species, in The Last Bus. A man who is kind to his surroundings, who is well-mannered and aware of the importance of interconnectedness. Younger fellow passengers constantly pull out their phones to film Tom displaying his roguishly old-fashioned behavior, before garnering hero status on social media.

Director Gillies MacKinnon and screenwriter Joe Ainsworth regularly gravitate towards the caricatural – both with Tom and with the bystanders who, by definition, regard him as someone from an earlier era. This is what it looks like The Last Bus as a somewhat old-fashioned variation on The Straight Storythat unusually ordinary David Lynch film in which an old American travels hundreds of miles on a riding lawn mower to come to terms with his brother.

Spall’s casting is the lifeline. Thanks to that appropriate melancholic look alone, the acting cannon never lets itself be molded into a character.