The Last 5 Years (2014)

From moment to moment, this Last Five Years is a robust entertainment, often stirring, sad, and funny.

Let us now praise Anna Kendrick, who is positively great in the small-scale The Last Five Years — so utterly wonderful that this adaptation of an off-Broadway musical deserves better than a token theatrical release to support its distribution via video-on-demand.

For Kendrick in particular, it’s a sign that she could sing her way through something bigger.

Beyond scrappy, The Last 5 Years lacks a unifying aesthetic, as if this were merely the run-through, grabbed on the fly without lights, costumes or location permits. This approach does improve upon the stage show in one key respect, however, allowing us to see all those crooned-over emotions writ large on the faces of its two terrific lead performers.

No, it’s not deep. But the film, a sung-through (virtually no dialogue) musical by Jason Robert Brown, is sweet and sunny and occasionally funny.