Our generation, if you still believe in such a thing, is consumed by cynicism. It’s a mood that dominates our culture and nothing is safe, not politics, not art and not love. It’s simultaneously defeatist and invincible, repellent but inescapable, empty but everywhere.

Olivier Assayas, now 50, grew up in France in the aftermath of May 1968 and was part of a generation that, in stark contrast, beats all before and after for its incredible sincerity. Something in the Air is so refreshing because Assayas brings that spirit to the screen. He displays insouciant disregard for that vacuous, post-ironic tendency that belittles passionate and (especially) youthful expression and leaves it trapped in cliché.

The film opens in 1971 with a bunch of Parisian high school revolutionaries who spray slogans and riot through the city with motorbike helmets and baseball bats. Bruised by rubber bullets and batons, a small band take refuge in a stairwell and, exhausted, they are bonded together in fear and a haze of tear gas. The narrative is then structured along their diverging paths, from this communal moment and through a summer in which they are forced to lie low after their near-lethal Molotov-cocktail assault on a school security guard.

Gilles (Clément Métayer), the character who aligns most closely to Assayas in this semi-autobiographical work, has had his girlfriend, the beautiful Laure (Carole Combes), leave him for London. He swiftly decamps to Italy with the equally sexy Christine (Lola Créton) and his fellow artist friend Alain (Felix Armand), who then meets and falls in love with Leslie (India Menuez) an LSD-dropping American dancer.

Assayas’s deft storytelling retains the romance and resists cheap mockery, irony or sarcasm. However, he doesn’t ignore these at the expense of criticism of Communist ideologues, agitprop film-makers or petit-bourgeois students who are convinced that they are liberating the workers. This tightrope act is achieved through a focus on the personal, rather than explicitly political, fallout of that radical spirit lingering from May ‘68.

The frequent fades that finish the short scenes accentuate their status as fragments of memory; they cut between each character’s story to create something of an ensemble piece but almost always retain Gilles at their heart. The 70s retro is pushed to the limit with headache-inducing tie-dye and a sumptuously proggy soundtrack and, in a reputation-boosting cameo, Johnny Flynn (yes, the sickeningly twee folk-popstar/half-decent stage actor) pops up as a protest singer covering Phil Ochs’ “Ballad of William Worthy”.

Olivier Assayas is one of the best film-makers working in Europe right now. His previous works, such as ‘Carlos’, about the Venezuelan terrorist, and Cold Water, whose protagonists are also named Gilles and Christine, have been rightly acclaimed. When we come to look back across his career though, Something in the Air may well be the standout success. Its holistic recreation of an atmosphere where revolution was not yet clichéd is a tonic to our irony-drenched existence. It might even provide an answer to that age-old question, Après Mai week, what?