Don’t believe in the redemptive power of music? Good Vibrations might convince you. The upbeat biography of Terri Hooley, the rascally Belfast entrepreneur who catalyzed the Belfast punk scene by equal parts instinct and accident, is testament to the ability of music to unite across party lines. Set against the Northern Ireland Troubles, Good Vibrations charts Hooley’s rise from backroom DJ to founder of Good Vibrations, the label responsible for Rudi and The Undertones, which he ran defiantly out of his record store on Great Victoria Street. Hooley had struck on an answer to the rigid and monotonous tensions he’d grown up with, godfathering a new wave of young punk bands for the sake of the precious green shoots of kinship and creativity that had sprung up across the sectarian divide. With the signing of The Undertones, mainstream success beckoned, and Hooley launches a charm offensive on London’s record labels and an incident-studded tour of the sports halls and meeting houses of British-occupied Ireland. Hooley is shielded in an unreflective belief in himself and his music, and for a while the sky’s the limit--but sure enough, some dire personal choices force his career into a natural arc that ends in glorious, comet-tailed burn-up. There are some raucous highs along the way: a personal epiphany while discovering punk music in a crushed pogoing dive, and a national epiphany when Teenage Kicks is played twice in a row by John Peel. With a central twinkly-eyed performance from Richard Dormer, and a trove of period tunes, Good Vibrations captures the natural politics of an openhearted youth movement. --Leo Batchelor