Starring Steve Coogan and Judi Dench. Rated PG.

A crowd pleaser unafraid to bare its teeth at times, Philomena also manages to show Steve Coogan in a new light. The caustic funnyman adapted the script, alongside Brit TV veteran Jeff Pope, from Martin Sixsmith’s nonfiction book The Lost Child of Philomena Lee. Coogan also produced the film and plays Sixsmith, an ex–BBC journalist suffering from a career fall as part of Tony Blair’s ill-fated team, and fumbling toward redemption by helping an Irishwoman find the son she gave up 45 years earlier.

The film was directed by Stephen Frears, who struck Oscar gold with The Queen in 2006 but has had an uneven few decades since his spectacular international arrival in the ’80s, with My Beautiful Laundrette. The direction here is also bumpy, with some sections overly dependent on home-movie and soundtrack flashbacks to guide our emotions. And there’s a dab of uncomfortably pandering humour, bordering on homophobia—weird, considering where the story goes.

Those quibbles aside, the tale is a marvel of two-handed acting, with Coogan testing his subtler ranges against Judi Dench, both blustering and simple as the title character, a retired nurse only now confronting the terrors of her youth. Knocked up after a single fairground encounter, the teenaged Philomena (played in Irish-set re-creations by impressive Sophie Kennedy Clark) is shipped off to a 1950s convent. There, as depicted much more brutally in Peter Mullan’s The Magdalene Sisters, she joins other abandoned girls in slave labour (in a most unbeautiful laundrette) while their “shameful” offspring are ripped away and sold into adoption.

Most of the movie follows the journey of agnostic, easily irritated Martin—an Oxford snob who learns some humility while stooping to write a “human interest” story—and the unsophisticated, too-forgiving Philomena. They travel to that same convent, where the current sisters are kinder but still deceitful, and then to Washington, D.C., where they suspect the lad was sent. To say more would be wrong, and anyway, Coogan’s character sums up the whole saga in just two words: “Fucking Catholics!”