Finding Emily      Director: Alicia MacDonaldCert: 12AStarring: Angourie Rice, Spike Fearn, Minnie Driver, Ella Maisy Purvis, Yali Topol Margalith, Kat RonneyRunning Time: 1 hr 50 minsTo begin on a positive note, it’s cheering to see Working Title, the production company that reinvigorated the romantic comedy in the 1990s with Four Weddings and a Funeral, return to a traditionally shaped example of the genre: there’s a little bit of Frank Capra’s Mr Deeds Goes to Town in the set-up here (on the female side, anyway). The amiable Owen (Spike Fearn), a musician who works at a fictional Manchester university, bumps into a chatty, attractive girl on a night out. She tells him her name is Emily and types her number into his phone. The next morning he’s horrified to discover a digit is missing. Accident or rejection? In his search for the missing Emily he encounters another student of that name (Angourie Rice), who secretly decides to use Owen as a case study for her thesis on the toxicity of romantic attraction (or whatever).Got that? It’s not a bad scenario for a romcom. That we know where the story is almost certainly headed is a feature, not a bug. The genre has always profited by having the viewer desperately urge key characters towards inevitable consummation. The actors are unlikely to be confused with Gary Cooper and Jean Arthur from the Capra flick, but they have a spring-fresh charm that remains pleasing throughout.There are, alas, a few too many clanks and whirrs in the machinery. The decision to communicate vital plot turns via a podcast that broadcasts on a big screen in one of the university’s open spaces asks a bit much of the audience. Minnie Driver’s role as “Dean Wilkinson”, erratic head of the college, feels lifted wholesale from an American campus comedy of the 1980s. And then there’s the film’s apparent desire to act as a promotional tool for the sometime Cottonopolis. The parade of Manc musical classics begins with New Order’s Blue Monday and ends with James Blake’s cover of their track Atmosphere. We get scenes on Canal Street. We get to see our hero playing with a jangly indie band in debt to the city’s famous 1990s.[ Barry Keoghan gives a tense, psychologically uneasy performance in Butterfly JamOpens in new window ]Never mind getting Owen to fall for the other Emily. If the film doesn’t get us to fall for Manchester it’s not for want of trying. In cinemas from Friday, May 22nd