Cameron Crowe can be a sentimental fool, of that much is clear. And if sentimentality is Crowe’s latter-day crutch, then fatherhood is surely Matt Damon’s. Together, they follow a path anticipated by Elizabethtown and Hereafter, in ‘We Bought a Zoo’: the almost true story of how a widower rediscovered love and joy in the shape of a rundown animal sanctuary. It is the written embodiment of that Sigur Ros song, the one that has trailed every BBC show of the last 7 years and a few others besides. In fact, I’d go as far as to say if you’ve heard even a snippet of Hoppipolla in any context whatsoever, you need read no further.

It is often said that when God closes a door, he opens a window. If that’s the case, then he gave Katherine terminal cancer and Benjamin a zoo. Benjamin Mee had been in mourning for six months, with only a fridge full of donated lasagne to show for it. Left alone to care for his two children, we meet him sometime after the pain has faded, but long before anything has started to make sense. Given the circumstances, you can imagine how a certain adventure might appeal; how real that it should come from an estate agent. J.B. Smoove is a little like Parker from Thunderbirds, only without the unfortunate Driving Miss Daisy connotations. In a field just outside Los Angeles (being a close relation to Plymouth, England), he introduces his new client to a zoo in disrepair, staffed by volunteers without the means to shore it up.

As you might expect, friends and family are quick to share their concerns. After all, buying a zoo is an expensive way to ease your grief. Thomas Hayden Church plays Duncan, his brother. They look alike, and share a kinship that defies their other differences. Benjamin is a little idealistic, while Duncan thinks more practically. The real Benjamin once wrote an article about the taboo attraction to widowhood: how women seemed drawn to him in a way they hadn’t before. Married friends would suddenly find reason to pop-by. Single parents would offer themselves to him at the school gates. “Work through the stages of grief,” Duncan tells him “but stop just short of a zebra”. Well, he didn’t say anything about a jaguar, did he?

The path to fulfilment is paved with small, mostly familiar dramas. As stories go, We Bought a Zoo is far more cloying than many will appreciate. Nonetheless, rich talent courses through its gooey veins, even if Patrick Fugit’s mute appearance serves no particular purpose other than to remind us of the dozen years since Almost Famous. Benjamin’s two children are appealing enough, with Maggie Elizabeth Jones in particular going some way to humanising a story so frequently overcome with schmaltz. Likewise, Scarlett Johansson – surely the world’s most unlikely zookeeper – displays a rare confidence in abilities that lie someway above her chest. Rven auxiliary characters, from the drunken carpenter to the punctilious inspector, are cast to the film’s benefit. Hayden Church’s own ironic contributions, of course, go entirely without saying.

The writing can be a little blunt (“Our adventure is. only. just. beginning”), for this is the acclaimed director in unusually crowd pleasing mood. Forget Matt Damon as the loving father just trying to make it work. Forget about his wife, still lingering on. If you want to know why this is still a Cameron Crowe movie at heart, then look to Elle Fanning, who remains so effortlessly beguiling that it’s a shame she has to grow up at all. She plays a 12-year-old girl who knows all about Bob Dylan, which is a given when you consider her voice belongs to a guy you cut his teeth writing for Rolling Stone magazine in the 1970s. Now positively middle-aged, Crowe is a screenwriter compelled to channel those zeitgeist experiences into the body of a blonde girl in love with a boy. Of course she loves Bob Dylan. She could probably give you the skinny on every Wilburys 7″ if you asked.

Weekend is not a gay film, though it shouldn’t matter even if it was. It features a gay couple, but they could just as well be a straight one. No sexuality is immune from issues of identity or shame. Their problems are those of any young person who has ever woken up with a stranger in their bed and wondered what came next. Does its playing out through two men make the subject any less resonant? For some, almost certainly. It is because of them Weekend has reason to exist at all.

It is all too easy to fall into the trap of believing the fight for gay equality is over. Forty years on from its first appearance in the Supreme Court, the issues surrounding homosexuality – and, indeed, the wider LGBT community – might have faded, but they have not disappeared. Today, we find ourselves distracted by debates on marriage and military service, yet they remain wholly political problems that require only a signature to solve. The real struggles lie within our own communities, where homosexuality is often still accepted only in a theoretical sense. How sad that a supposedly enlightened society still takes “…I just don’t want to see it” to be a point of tolerance, not bigotry.

Only Russell’s close friends know of his sexuality, and even then it goes without comment. He doesn’t need a broken legislature to be forced into a public life of near-asexuality. Gay nightclubs flourish, yet what goes on there is rarely discussed with the same frankness allowed their straight counterparts. When some sexualities are more equal than others, it gives rise to the kind of inconsistencies that see men like Russell listening to colleagues boasting about how many fingers they can get inside a girl, when they wouldn’t be offered the same courtesy in return. At least the more overt discriminations of the 70s and 80s offered some manifest injustice to rally against. Now there is only acquiescence.

Navigating such a world comes with the usual social gatherings at which to mingle, or the occasion to exchange pleasantries at a Goddaughter’s birthday party. As happy as they are, such occasions are a lie. Only at night, under cover of driving beats propelling darkened rooms, can Richard truly shed the expectations of others; the pervasive belief that the likes of Glen are unseemly and taboo. They meet, not entirely by chance, in a bathroom stall. As morning breaks, they drink tea in Russell’s bedroom. Glen pulls a small tape recorder from his bag and asks Russell to recall their night together. Click. Silence. Even here, open dialogue seems like a foreign tongue. Richard’s shame, acquired through osmosis, is now inescapable.

An affair in a weekend, in which a fledgling couple talk about their feelings, masked in the easy language of promiscuity. The stereotypes of the closeted and the proud are just that, but they grow into a mature, perceptive exploration of intimacy as practiced by an entire generation. Whenever there is talk of a future together, the pair retreat into arguments and posturing. Glen, once so vocal in his espousal of an open lifestyle, proves stubborn and defensive; Russell, more open to change. “When you first sleep with someone you don’t know, you become a blank canvas upon which you project what you want to be”. A line as true as any, theirs is a romance that attempts to bridge the gap that emerges once the pretence is over. In doing so, it is revealed as being that of any other. Weekend is not a gay film, but a truthful one.