The typical Japanese movie about the travails and triumphs of a high school club follows an upward arc, as the audience cheers on the heroes to their foregone triumph over setbacks and defeats. The actualities of how they become more accomplished swing musicians, as in "Swing Girls," or choral singers, as in "Kuchibiru ni Uta Wo" ("Have a Song on Your Lips"), are sketched, but no one would ever call these films how-to guides.

Katsuyuki Motohiro's "Maku ga Agaru (The Curtain Rises)" couldn't be called that either. But this film about a high school drama club in a provincial town, based on a novel by theater director Oriza Hirata, makes the process of putting on a play — the artistic and personal growth of its young actors included — its centerpiece. The intricacies and intimacies of this process differ for every production, I suppose, but the script by Kohei Kiyasu, another theater director, has an extraordinary feeling of veracity in everything from the internal monologue of the uncertain club captain Saori (Kanako Momota) to the no-nonsense advice of its unofficial coach (Haru Kuroki) — a young teacher whose own once-brilliant acting career is on hiatus.

Also, the film expands beyond its "let's put on a play" story to the more universal theme of human growth and change, and not only from adolescence to adulthood, but from inner doubt to positive action, from aspirations to accomplishments. Yes, it aims to uplift, as does every single film in this seishun eiga (youth films) subgenre, but it also doesn't cheat. Every good thing that happens to the characters feels truly and at times painfully earned, not gifted by a happy-ending plot.