Film strikes cord when it opens at the Panida

“Florence Foster Jenkins” will strike a chord with those looking who enjoy a film with of originality, excellent acting and amazingly awful singing. A good film made better by doing bad, bad singing that is, but don’t let that scare you away from a good story.

The story of the terrible opera singer Florence Foster Jenkins is such a good one, you wonder why it has never been told on screen before. Earlier in the year the story was told in the fictionalized and stylized account, “Marguerite,” that has been charming French audiences for a while now but with more mixed reviews.

Now comes Stephen Frears’ more historically faithful “Florence Foster Jenkins”. Set in New York in 1944, the last year of the deluded socialite’s life, and populated mainly by British character actors like John Sessions, Allan Corduner, Stanley Townsend, Christian McKay and David Haigh buzzing around our favorite queen Meryl Streep in the title role, it’s like a funny, musical take on “The Iron Lady.”

Both films about the socialite singer approach their subject with such affection that they transcend biography.

Frears’ film tiptoes more daintily into farce and poignant comedy. Indeed, you can see “Florence Foster Jenkins” enjoying a similar path headed toward ending up back on the stage as a musical sometime soon which might open up a part for those for whom carrying a tune scares the bucket.

Streep’s first entrance is a hilarious role in an amateurish revue for her upscale Verdi Club, where she’s lowered on a rope playing an angelic muse of inspiration for her own father. Florence is energetically supported in her musical endeavors by her husband, the failed Shakespearean actor and “eminent monologuist” St. Clair Bayfield, played with renewed vigor by Hugh Grant in by far one of his best and most committed performance in awhile. Grant’s work is typically charming, giving elegant life to such phrases in Nicholas Martin’s script as, “I doubt even Mrs O’Flaherty can slurp a trout.”

Florence’s wealthy eccentricities — including a collection of chairs “in which notable people have expired” — become a source of interest, as does her whimsical hiring of pianist Cosmé McMoon, played by “Big Bang Theory” star Simon Helberg.

Grant walks the tightrope with considerable skill, ushering in the changes of tone with beaming, reaction shots while he throws a protective ring around his beloved “Bunny.” The fact that there appears to be genuine affection and love here is what gives the film its emotional core, even while Grant’s St Clair is shacked up in Brooklyn with a mistress, Kathleen, (Rebecca Ferguson “Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation”) — in an apartment paid for by Florence, no less.

Visit www.panida.org for more information and ticketing. Showing Thursday, Sept. 1 at 7:30 p.m.; Friday, Sept. 2 at 5:30 p.m.; Saturday, Sept. 3 at 7:30 p.m.; and Sunday, Sept. 4, at 3:30 p.m.