When you’re a child, everything is your first. Both joy and trauma have equal power in one’s formation, and although the details of each event might slip away or alter, their impact does not. Following you throughout the years, few things remain as indelible as one’s introduction to shame, or the ecstasy of a winning moment, or, when least expected, the most proper song.

Terence Davies’s The Long Day Closes involves itself with that period of life when innocence is at ebb tide, but the days have not yet lost their halcyon glow; when childhood still seems never ending and maturity remains but a shade on the horizon. The director has stated elsewhere that the scenes portrayed in the film represent the happiest years of his life. Indeed, from the opening with its rain-soaked, dilapidated alley (with possibly the most inspired use of the Hoagy Carmichael tune “Stardust” since Woody Allen’s in Stardust Memories) to the final shot of faint clouds against the moon as Arthur Sullivan’s “The Long Day Closes” plays in its sublime entirety—the artist seems to be almost in mourning for that vanished epoch. […]