The opening twenty-odd minutes, detailing the infant years of the "Little Sparrow", shacking up in a brothel with golden-hearted whores and busking with her contortionist father, do not bode well.

Resembling a Stella Artois advert this opening sequence is standard True Movies adversity note by note.

But, when Cotillard takes centre stage the film finds its focus, and Dahan gets to grips with the tricksy flashback and flashforward structure, cannily juxtaposing the happiness and adversity that punctuated Piaf’s tumultuous life.

Dahan also eschews name dropping the celebrities that populated the singer’s life, focussing instead on the cadre of close acquaintances with whom Edith surrounded herself.

Foremost amongst these are Momone (Testud), Piaf’s best friend, her manager (Greggory), Leplee (Depardieu), the club owner who gave Edith her first break, and Asso (Barbe), the intense patron who moulded her into an icon.

Even for the misery friendly biopic genre, Edith Piaf’s life was a veritable shopping list of tragedy.

Frequently abandoned by alcoholic parents, press-ganged into working for a mobster, losing the love of her life to a violent accidental, arthritic and hooked on morphine after a car crash and succumbing to cancer aged 47, La Vie En Rose threatens to be a gruelling marathon of misfortune.

Yet, due to a sweeping scope, Cotillard’s fiery energy and liberal use of Piaf’s still-beguiling songs, Dahan conjures up a life on screen, a warts and all tale not afraid to portray the difficult sides of its subject.

Forget such stodgy Stateside musicals as Ray or Walk the Line, La Vie En Rose is the real deal.

The 140 minute running time will test some audiences, and certain subplots, particularly Momone’s near Sapphic relationship with Edith, are half-baked and underdeveloped, but Piaf’s relationship with boxer Marcel Cerdan (Martins) is well-handled in a romantic, old-fashioned way so that the inevitable tragedy is all the more affecting.

And then there is Cotillard. Best known as the prostitute-assassin in A Very Long Engagement she physically transforms herself into Piaf, uncannily capturing the bony, hunched figure, the goofy looking diva whose burning charisma more than compensated for her tiny frame.

Cotillard has the role of a lifetime and provides the performance to match.

La Vie En Rose will entrance even those with only the scantest knowledge of the French songstress, and nestles beside The Glenn Miller Story and The Buddy Holly Story as one of the best musical biopics.

Rob Daniel