IN Swedish filmmaker Moodysson’s dramatisation of a cartoon strip by his wife, schoolgirls Bobo and Klara, soon to start climbing puberty’s upward slope, want to become a punk band but neither has any musical skill. They have devised pejorative lyrics listing their reasons for loathing sport. They have worked out that that business about God is a rip-off.

So why does the film have the MA classification? Because the subtitles are not coy about Bobo and Klara’s vocabulary.

Children of their age are almost certainly familiar with those words and probably wonder why grown-ups think them wicked. Moodysson’s film is aimed more at parents than children. Which, by an inverted rationale, is a good reason to take youngsters along to see it.

It’s fun. While it may stretch belief, it’s essentially credible. It doesn’t present sex, drugs or rock ‘n roll as glamorous in a grown-up sense. Its young characters are doing their best to maintain a stable footing on a journey through perilous unexplored terrain. And parents might learn from it about punk rock, as I did. Musically infantile. Not to my taste. But I certainly found merit in the purpose of what the words were trying to explain.

At Palace Electric