Starring Dave Johns. Rated 14A

Last week, amazingly, Scotland’s government kicked out all of the private companies involved in the “business” of benefit assessments. Keep this victory for basic human decency in mind when you enter the theatre to watch I, Daniel Blake, the latest howl of outrage from master agitator Ken Loach. Set just on the other side of Scotland’s border in Newcastle, the film begins with its titular character—a lifelong handyman newly sidelined by a heart attack—being quizzed about his bowel health among other irrelevant matters by a “healthcare professional”, whose real job, as the endlessly wry, near-retirement-age carpenter well knows, is to plunge so-called “spongers” into a perfectly indecent system of welfare denial.

Sounds a bit dry? I, Daniel Blake is anything but, British humour being the indefatigable thing that it is, especially the finely tuned sarcasm of the eternally depressed north. Blake is played by comedian Dave Johns, who manages to offset the character’s mounting frustrations—he’s not allowed to work, but he’s also not not allowed to work, basically—with a sweet combination of humility and cutting wit. Daniel’s own basic human decency is such that he takes a young woman and her family under his meagre wing, busying himself with home repairs and general counsel while she frets and falls into the only kind of work that’s available to a dirt-poor and starving single mom.

With her brow knitted into a furrow of incessant worry, Hayley Squires (A Royal Night Out) is superb as Katie, and she tears your heart out with a climactic scene set inside a food bank. Meanwhile, Daniel’s Kafka-esque journey through social services culminates in a droll act of civil disobedience that turns him into a minor folk hero—for a brief but precious moment, at least.

This is the film that garnered a Palme d’Or and a standing ovation at Cannes for the 80-year-old Loach (hey, more basic decency!), whose entire career has been dedicated to chronicling the vicious economic warfare waged by Britain’s government against its poor. If it all seems a bit didactic beneath the humour and the heart—it is. But the other side has been shoving sleazy propaganda disguised as entertainment down our throats for so long now, most of us don’t even notice. So fuck it.