If you're going to make a documentary about your own band, you might as well make it charming. James, the seminal Manchester indie group, have done exactly that with 'Getting Away With It', a portrait that's part auto-hagiography, part cautionary tale about what happens when you turn down the Smiths for enlightenment.

Subtitled 'Sects, Trance and Rock'n'Roll', the film traces the band's trajectory from their first flush of success in the early '90s baggy scene - when indie discos were packed with people in oversized daisy petal T-shirts and 'Sit Down' was famously kept off the No 1 spot by Chesney Hawkes - back to their origins. That's where we meet Tim Booth, a middle-class, boarding school-educated future singer, who encounters a bunch of working-class borderline hooligans in a band after they sneak into the University of Manchester's student union bar and swipe his drinks. A meet-cute for the ages, really.

Their manager describes them as 'a band that took all the wrong turns and made every mistake possible.' Exhibit A: they turned down Factory Records' offer to release a first album because they didn't want a product number. Exhibit B: they declined a support slot on the Smiths' US tour because half the group had joined an esoteric meditation cult and the bassist's enlightenment schedule clashed. Priorities, people.

The documentary features interviews with a parade of former members - because nothing says 'objective journalism' like asking only the people who were in the band. Yet, somehow, it's good-natured, funny, and occasionally rousing. It's a testament to James's enduring appeal that they can turn decades of near-misses and wrong turns into a charming story. Or maybe it's just that in an era of manufactured pop, there's something refreshing about a band that made every mistake possible and still got to be seminal.