Movie musicals have always been a Hollywood (and Bollywood) favorite, but we shouldn’t forget that the French have made a few worthy contributions to the genre themselves. Beginning with Jacques Demy, whose The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and The Young Girls of Rochefort are certified classics, other Gallic greats have tried their hand at musicals over the years, including Jean-Luc Godard (A Woman Is a Woman), Alain Resnais (Same Old Song), Christophe Honoré (Love Songs), François Ozon (8 Women), Léos Carax (Annette) and, just last year, Jacques Audiard (Emilia Perez).

What most of these films have in common is an unlikely mélange of reality with song-and-dance. There’s no equivalent of Broadway in Paris, and thus no long tradition of musicals done on stage, so many of the French movies are set in actual locations, with seemingly real people who suddenly decide to belt out a chanson or break into a dance number. Demy was the first to pull that off, shooting his musicals in two seaside French towns, and he set a standard that’s often been followed since — most recently with Audiard’s showstopping Mexican narcos (even if that movie was shot in a studio in Paris, it was made to look as realistic as possible).

First-time director Amélie Bonnin attempts to keep the tradition alive in Leave One Day (Partir Un Jour), a gritty small-town dramedy in which, every so often, people start singing and gyrating. They do so in greasy spoon kitchens, county fairs, drunken late-night barbecues and cheesy rural night clubs, as well as a few other locations in the central Loir-et-Cher region where the movie was lensed. And in nearly each number, they’re lead by popular French chanteuse Juliette Armanet, making her debut in a leading role as Cécile, a celebrity chef who returns home to help out at her parents’ roadside restaurant.

What happens to Cécile is a tad more predictable than all the music that springs out of nowhere: She crosses paths with her high school sweetheart, Raphaël (Bastien Bouillon), a local boy who runs a body shop and still has the hots for his old squeeze. Meanwhile, her mom (Dominique Blanc) and dad (François Rollin) are having a hard time keeping their family business afloat, especially after the latter suffers a heart attack that prompts Cécile to rush back home. And let’s not forget about her current boyfriend, Sofiane (Tewfik Jallab), a fellow Top Chef contestant with whom she’s about to open a hyped-up new eatery in Paris.

Bonnin, who adapted the script with Dimitri Lucas from her César award-winning short, offers up a boilperlate coming-home scenario bolstered by a few keen observations and a fair amount of charm. Despite a setting that could serve as the backdrop for a Dardennes brothers movie, Leave One Day never descends into blue-collar miserabilism, nor does it dish out the kind of mud-covered musical numbers found in Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark. What happens can be a bit grim at times, but the tone is mostly upbeat.

This is due in large part to the singing sequences, which Bonnin inserts into the action without warning. From the opening scene, in which Cécile and Sofiane break into an impromptu version of rapper Stromae’s club anthem, “Alors on danse,” the stage is set for a movie in which the music creates a mood rather than telling much of a story. Most of the songs are not, in fact, original numbers, but jukebox hits by Céline Dion or Claude François or Michel Delpech (few outside of France have heard of the latter two) that have been reworked by a team of seven credited composers.

Leave One Day is therefore less of a musical comedy than a karaoke musical — or perhaps a Spotify musical from a playist entitled “Mes chansons préférées.” It’s closest in form and function to Resnais’ Same Old Song, which used French pop standards in ways never quite done before, and which was a major local hit when it was released back in 1997. But that film failed to gain much traction abroad, and it’s likely that Bonnin’s movie will play best in Francophone countries, where Armanet remains a popular artist.

The singer asserts herself confidently on screen, perhaps more when she’s performing than when she’s acting, although she does the latter convincingly enough. Cécile gets lots of flak from her dad, as well as from the old gang, for becoming a celebrity and betraying her roots, especially when she disses the high-calorie cuisine cooked up by her folks. It’s an unpleasant position to be in — one complicated by the fact that she’s pregnant and hasn’t told anyone. Armanet does a good job embodying these conflicts without overdoing it, showing how easily Cécile falls under the charm of her dirty old town, especially when she spends more time with the fun and seductive Raphaël.

The film’s musical highlight is definitely the scene where the two of them go visit the ice-skating rink they used to hang out at as teenagers, reliving a love affair that ended too abruptly. Bonnin sets that sequence to the corny 2004 rap song “Femme Like U,” with the actors belting out its ridiculous chorus — “Donne-moi ton coeur baby, ton corps baby…” (“Give me your heart baby, your body baby…”) — as they glide in tandem across the ice.

Both Armanet and the excellent Bouillon (The Night of the 12th) give their best at that moment, skating, singing and reveling in the nostalgia that Leave One Day revels in as a whole, both musically and thematically. Bonnin serves up the same kind of comfort food Cécile’s parents serve to their truckers, easy to enjoy but ultimately a bit bland. She’s made a feel-good movie about people who, for the most part, aren’t feeling all that good, leaving the viewer with a pleasant aftertaste that fades away as soon as the last song ends.