Fleapit revisited:Gagarine.

"People, let us preserve and increase this beauty and not destroy it" - Yuri Gagarin

The Soviet cosmonaut was, of course, talking about the beauty of our planet as seen from Vostok 1 when he became the first man in space in 1961. Sixty years later that sentiment, if not those words, are repeated by a young man living in a tower block earmarked for destruction on the outskirts of Paris. His name, too, happens to be Youri - and the block he lives in is called Gagarine.

Fanny Liatard and Jérémy Trouilh's film of the same name, their debut, tells the story of Youri (Alseni Bathily) as he campaigns to save the block from demolition and, more so, the break up of the interconnected patchwork of, often marginalised, lives of the people that live there.

Youri's not like the other youngsters who prefer to sit around, talking football, bantering and boasting. He's intelligent, sensitive, peaceful, and excessively fond of Gagarine - the block - and Gagarin - the cosmonaut. All space in fact. Since being abandoned by his mother he has struck up an almost maternal friendship with block resident Fari (Farida Rahouadj) as well as a similarly fraternal one with his friend Houssam (Jamil McCraven).

All this is threatened should Gagarine be destroyed. But Gagarine is not simply a schematic piece of social realist drama. In places it is that but it is also equal parts a rites of passage story, a meditative study on the power of place and belonging, and even a romance of sorts.

Youri lives in a world of cranes, caravans, poverty, plastic chairs, and faceless officials but he seeks, via his love of outer space and his kindness towards others, to elevate himself into a different sphere. At one point he makes a moving comment about the 'celestial suburbs' he lives in. The centre, he contends, like those in space, cannot shine so brightly without them.

When a young, pretty, and intelligent Roma girl Diana (Lyna Khoudri) becomes friends with Youri and Houssam the three of them embark on a series of small adventures as they seek ways to thwart city planners. Another who comes into their orbit is Dali (Finnegan Oldfield), a small time drug dealer forever getting into fights and other scrapes. Dali is a boy lost in a man's body and his true vocation, it is suggested more than once, to become a whirling dervish seems as out of reach as Youri's dreams of travelling into distant galaxies.

But it is the dynamic between Youri and Diana, as well as that between Youri and the block itself, that is the film's most powerful. Underpinned by a brilliant soundtrack (mostly by Evgueni and Sacha Galperine but with songs by, perhaps unsurprisingly, Serge Gainsbourg and, maybe less obviously, The Streets), beautifully shot, and with two wonderful central performances by Bathily and Khoudri, Gagarine aims for the stars and if it doesn't quite reach infinity and beyond it is still a trip worth taking.