BANK OF DAVE

Watch The Trailer

Storyline (warning: spoilers)

Bank of Dave is one of those David versus Goliath stories, based on the real-life tale of a small-town businessman who tried to set up his own bank to keep money invested in his own community rather than going to pay annual bonuses to chaps who went to Eton and studied economics at Cambridge and Oxford.

Dave Fishwick (Rory Kinnear) has been doing quite well with his van rental company in his northern England hometown of Burnley - so well that he has been able to lend a bit of money here and there to members of his community hit by the recent 2008 financial crisis.

Dave would like to turn what has been an informal arrangement into something more formal, perhaps a community bank, but the posh blokes from London's financial industry don't see Dave as the kind of chap deserving of the necessary license.

Dave hires a lawyer from London (Joel Fry as Hugh) to help him take on these faceless men, initially as a cynical exercise. Dave wants Hugh to get the banking types to publicly admit that it's a closed club that belongs to the Eton crowd who think that Dave is undeserving of a license, and perhaps he can at least score some points in the media or in the court of public opinion.

But it turns out Hugh is good at his job and one of the banking industry players makes a mistake coming after Dave with the force of the London Police. It's a misstep Hugh parlays into a possible resentful invitation to join the banking world, though not without a seemingly insurmountable new set of obstacles.

The story is winsome and I'm sure any banking fat cats who feel maligned by the creative license in the screenplay can cry themselves to sleep on their enormous pillows of cash.