Charming ‘Idol’ tale of triumph

There’s an irresistible pull to the story of Mohammed Assaf, the Palestinian wedding singer who made his way from a refugee camp in the Gaza Strip to the TV screens of tens of millions of fans. The same can be said of “The Idol,” an uneven but charmingly earnest fictionalized account of Assaf’s rise through the ranks of hopefuls on the reality contest “Arab Idol.”

Among those rooting for the instantly symbolic performer was the filmmaker Hany Abu-Assad, whose previous dramas about life in the occupied territories - the Oscar-nominated “Paradise Now” and “Omar” - took the form of wrought, provocative thrillers. For Assaf’s undeniably romantic tale of triumph, director Abu-Assad and his co-writer, Sameh Zoabi, divide the story between two time frames, Assaf’s childhood in Gaza and the point in his young adulthood when he determines to leave.

The film’s first 40 minutes, focusing on the young Assaf, his sister and two best friends, has the classic sheen of cinema about kids being resourceful in hardscrabble circumstances. The musicians earn money for instruments by delivering fast food to Egypt through the smuggling tunnels.

Qais Atallah plays Assaf as a boy, and he resembles the real deal more than the actor who has the role in the movie’s second half. He conveys sweetness and resilience with ease. But the early sequences, and in many ways the entire film, belong to the spirited Hiba Atallah as Assaf’s sister, Nour. If a star is born in this story of against-the-odds stardom, it would be her.

Tawfeek Barhom is a compelling presence as the college-age singer, though he’s called on to lip-sync, a distraction that gives way to a disorienting jolt with the director’s last-minute switch to footage of Assaf himself in the contest’s climactic moment. But how the taxi-driving young man gets to glittering, cosmopolitan Cairo from the rubble of Gaza plays out as an involving combination of fairy tale and political reality.

His journey involves the support of lifelong friends as well as a mentor, a sympathetic border guard and the black marketer who showed Assaf and his bandmates no mercy when they came to him as kids.