THE film Death of a Ladies’ Man (Cert. 15) plays like a melancholic equivalent of the Mamma Mia films, but weaving a story around Leonard Cohen songs instead of Abba’s. Samuel (Gabriel Byrne) is a professor of poetry in Montreal and on a downward spiral of despair. Living an alcohol-fuelled existence, he has run through a couple of marriages and countless women.

With more than a passing reference to Hamlet, the film is a meditation on mortality and hope. A brain tumour threatening Samuel’s “too, too solid flesh” concentrates the mind wonderfully, leading him to ponder that “undiscover’d country from whose bourn no traveller returns”. Except, as in Hamlet, his dead father (Brian Gleeson) does pay a visit back to earth to counsel him. The first of three chapters is prefaced by a quotation from Cohen’s “Bird on a Wire”, “in which a man learns his fate”. At an ice-hockey match, we then get the whole song accompanying a dance routine: a figment of Samuel’s hallucinated condition. It feels like an excuse to insert a musical number rather than something that drives the narrative.

The second chapter is headed “There is a crack in everything”. The next line of “Anthem”, from which this comes, continues: “That’s how the light gets in.” It becomes apparent that, long before the tumour affected Samuel’s faltering grasp on reality, he had been living a life beset by nightly fears and fantasies. Booze and sex, which have propped up his self-esteem, are now failing and frightening him. Losing someone (including a false self), his father suggests, “isn’t the answer to every little last thing that’s wrong with you”.

This is the cue for more of “Anthem” and its message that brokenness drives us to seek a higher power. Acknowledging our imperfections, according to Cohen, is the gateway to resurrection. Much of the final chapter (“Let Us Sing Another Song, Boys”) occurs back in rural Ireland, Samuel’s birthplace. Again, there is a mixture of fact and illusion. But while, for us, it is becoming harder to distinguish one from the other, there is an emerging degree of clarity, as he finally writes a book of his own.

Returning to Montreal, Samuel asks his father where are they headed. “Home,” he says. As the credits roll, we are treated to “Heart With No Companion”, featuring the words “Now I greet you from the other side of sorrow and despair.”

It all feels a little too contrived. The Irish trip is an unconvincing volte-face. The Grim Reaper scene is plain clumsy. Nor does the attempt to inject humour into a dying man’s situation really come off. “Do you ever get the feeling”, he asks, “that God is laughing at us?” with the implication that having plans of one’s own is the Almighty’s idea of a rib-tickler. The sub-plots involving his first wife, son, and daughter would have benefited from more screen time than the near-solipsism of the main character; but that’s Leonard Cohen for you: forever seeking dialogue with the divine through “the holy or the broken Hallelujah”. Yes, we get that song, too, loud and clear.

Death of a Ladies’ Man is released on digital download.