John Carney, Irish to his toes, has no Marvel heroes, capes or swords, rescued damsels, car chases or shoot-outs in his bag of tricks.

His “Flora and Son” is as fresh and bright as newly washed clothes hanging on a line in the sun, with a cast of sparkling actors: Eve Hewson (Flora), Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Jeff), Jack Reynor as Flora’s first husband, Ian,  and a young Oren Kinlan as Flora’s son Max.

“Flora and Son” is simply about love and music, and to quote dear old poet William Congreve.

“Music has charms to soothe a savage breast.” And it kind of does that on the mean modern streets of Dublin.

Now playing at Waterville’s Maine Film Center, writer/director Carney (“Sing Street,” “Once” and “Begin Again”) gives you anger, frustration and lots of music and love in his “Flora and Son.”

He takes us to an Ireland where it doesn’t rain during the whole film, and where old John Ford and his crew of Irish-American actors — John Wayne, Barry Fitzgerald or Maureen O’Hara — or anything green are nowhere to be seen in this modern love story.

He gives us, instead, happy young Irish faces drinking stout, dancing in the dark and playing new songs on old guitars and falling in love. Isn’t that the movie you want to see today?

We’re on a working-class street in modern Dublin, filled with kids of the New Ireland, and being led by Carney who paints a love story of three lost souls and the music that soothes their savage hearts.

Carney’s gentle savage is Flora, a young accident victim hit not by a car or bus, but by a bad marriage with a smarter musician that left her just out of her teens and set back on the street where she grew up.

Here she survives with little education and a rebellious son whom, we slowly discover, has inherited, along with her eyes and attitudes, a large soft heart that hears music that keeps him awake.

Flora and Max, actually both emotionally the same age, spend their days punching words at each other, spitting the F-word in the air yet still holding on to each other, because there is no other hand to grasp.

Max, with a street-mouth and gentle heart, already has a record with the local cops for shoplifting, and is just one more snatch-up away from reform school.

Flora goes about picking up part-time jobs here and there, working mostly as a babysitter for a wealthy woman, while stealing money from her purse on her way out the door.

Then, the day after a failed birthday for Max, Carney moves the pieces around.

Flora finds a guitar in an excavation truck, takes it to a music shop, bargains for a price to bring it to life, has it repaired and, when Max turns it down, she tries to toss it away.

Then, wouldn’t you know, the legendary Joni Mitchell’s soft and sweet “Both Sides Now” comes along on a video and finds that spot in Flora’s damaged heart where magic sleeps.

She cries, as we all do when Joni sings, and touches the guitar gently, as though it were a discarded puppy dog, and the new clean strings send her looking for a teacher.

This is where Joseph Gordon-Levitt (“Snowden,” “The Trial of the Chicago 7”) emerges in his best role ever as Jeff, an older survivor of alcohol and a messy divorce, in Los Angeles who now, in a “bottom-of-the-world job” teaches guitar at $20 a lesson, online from his house in Joni Mitchell’s ancient hills.

Jeff listens, strums and gives sweet and honest $20 worth of advice in a soft, comforting tone that Flora has never heard before.

She flirts and chatters about going to America.

Jeff discourages that idea, but Carney has a magic laptop and a clever idea that … you’ll have to see for yourself.

The lovely, quirky Hewson, besides topping her performance in AppleTV+ “Bad Sisters” and Netflix’s mini-series “Behind Her Eyes,” sings her own song “High Life” in the film.

The film’s score includes Tom Waits’ “I Hope That I Don’t Fall in Love with You” and Hoagy Carmichael’s “I Get Along Without You Very Well (Except Sometimes).”

It doesn’t get any better than that.

J.P. Devine of Waterville is a former stage and screen actor.

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