Looking for Eric (2009)

There are two Erics in “Looking for Eric.” One is Eric Bishop (Steve Evets), a middle-aged Manchester, England, postal worker whose existence has been a chronicle of hardship and disappointment, much of it self-inflicted. We first see him driving the wrong way around a traffic circle. The ensuing accident is almost redundant, since he was already pretty much a wreck already. That is what we discover as the film unfolds.
First off, Eric lives in a crumbling house with two teenage stepsons (Gerard Kearns and Stefan Gumbs) who both appear to be en route from ordinary adolescent sullenness to outright criminality. Their mother, his second wife, has been released from prison several months earlier, and has yet to return to the nest. And seems unlikely to do so. So he feels responsible for them, and stuck in a very bad situation. He also has an infant granddaughter and a grown-up daughter (Lucy-Jo Hudson), whose mother was his first wife, Lily (Stephanie Bishop). He abandoned her many years before, much to his seemingly eternal regret. Yet he feels powerless to look her in the eye, much less talk to her about what happened.
Once upon a time, he was young and handsome, a gifted dancer full of potential, wearing blue suede shoes back when that was cool. Now he is angry, stressed out and miserable, in spite of his friends’ efforts to cheer him up with jokes and Meatball's hilarious self-help exercises. His eldest step son is escalating into a life that will surely end him in jail, and as he struggles with what to do about it, screaming and smoking pot, his larger than life sports hero, Eric Cantona, comes to life. As a muse, a hallucination--but also as a therapist. The second Eric is full of sports metaphors and pep talks, but underneath it all Eric Bishop is able to find solutions to the problems that face him. Cantona gets Bishop exercising, shaving, asking his former wife out for tea, cleaning up his house, and he gives him the idea to get his son out of the bind he is in and a shot at a second chance. This is a worthwhile and thought provoking movie.