Asakusa Kid is the story of how a foul-mouthed dropout became Beat Takeshi, told from the wings of a theatre that was already going dark. Gekidan Hitori, a comedian himself, directs his first feature from Takeshi Kitano’s own memoir, and what he makes is less a biopic than a love letter to a teacher most of the world has forgotten.

At its centre is a partnership. Yuya Yagira plays the young Take, a sullen kid who climbs the stairs of the France-za strip theatre looking for work and finds a master instead. Yo Oizumi plays that master, Senzaburo Fukami, a brilliant, dandyish comedian whose star is fading exactly as his pupil’s begins to rise. Everything tender in the film lives in the space between them.

The France-za, and an Asakusa already closing

Asakusa in the 1960s is a dying kingdom of vaudeville — strip shows with comedy sketches between the acts, tap routines, manzai patter, a whole working-class theatre culture being quietly emptied out by the television set in everyone’s living room. Hitori films it with affection: the cramped dressing rooms, the cigarette smoke, the dancers, the gruff camaraderie of performers who already know the audience is shrinking.

Into this world Fukami drills his apprentice the only way he knows. Tap dance until your feet bleed. Time a joke to the half-second. Never let the crowd see you sweat for the laugh. The training passages are the film’s best — funny, hard, oddly moving — and they carry the idea that comedy is a craft as exacting as any classical art, learned by repetition and humiliation and the occasional slap.

Two performances holding the film up

Oizumi is the reason it works. His Fukami is vain, generous and terrified of irrelevance all at once, and the actor finds the melancholy under the bluster without ever begging for it. Yagira, a watchful screen presence since he was a child, plays Take as a closed door slowly opening; the famous Kitano deadpan is there in embryo. Mugi Kadowaki, as the dancer Chiharu, gives the picture its warmth at the margins.

A reverent biopic, and its limits

Where the film turns cautious is with Kitano himself. It is a respectful portrait — perhaps too respectful — that admires its subject from a polite distance and rarely pushes into the harder, stranger corners of the man who would become Takeshi Kitano the director and provocateur. As showbiz biopics go it keeps to the surface, hitting the expected beats of the rise: the first real laugh, the breakup of a double act, the inevitable parting from the teacher. What saves it from the genre’s usual blandness is sincerity, and a true feeling for a vanished world.

Our verdict

Asakusa Kid is a warm, handsomely made, slightly conventional film carried by two excellent performances and a genuine grief for the stage that made its hero. It will mean most to anyone curious about where Beat Takeshi came from — and to anyone who has ever loved a teacher whose best days were behind him. Modest, but it stays with you.