When Ruby Rossi (Emilia Jones) sings, she gets a good feeling. Sorting through the daily catch aboard her family’s fishing boat in Massachusetts, the 17-year-old high school student croons Etta James’s classic Something’s Gotta Hold on Me with unselfconscious abandon. She squeezes her eyes shut, a groove gripping her shoulders. Her voice is striking and lovely, not that her dad, Frank (Troy Kotsur), or older brother, Leo (Daniel Durant), seem to pay it any attention. The film soon reveals it’s not that they haven’t noticed – it’s that they haven’t heard.

Ruby is a Coda – a hearing child of deaf adults – and as her brother is also deaf, she serves as the whole family’s unofficial interpreter, translating their American Sign Language (ASL) to both the local fishing community and the meddling authorities. It’s a full-time commitment that competes with her schoolwork, her social life and, now, choir practice, which she signs up for on a whim. Her music teacher, Bernardo “Mr V” Villalobos (Eugenio Derbez), takes note of her forthright talent as well as her faltering confidence, insisting she work towards auditioning for Boston’s Berklee College of Music. Equipped with an endless supply of motivational quotes and quirky cardigans, he prescribes her breathing exercises and a duet with her crush, Miles (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo).

The two are to perform Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell’s Motown hit You’re All I Need to Get By at the school concert, an excuse for them to practise a cappella in Ruby’s cramped bedroom. If this sounds worryingly like an episode of the shrill teen TV show Glee, mercifully it couldn’t be less like it. Heder chooses not to structure the film as a series of showy musical numbers. Instead, scenes in which we hear Ruby sing, including one where she reluctantly, then ferociously, belts out Joni Mitchell’s Both Sides Now, are grounded in emotion, not spectacle.

This US remake of the 2014 French comedy-drama La Famille Bélier, about the hearing daughter of deaf parents who secretly dreams of becoming a singer, is a warm, fuzzy and feel good, taking a timeless coming-of-age tale and braiding it with a timely political agenda. Writer-director (Tallulah) takes great care to increase and improve the long-overdue representation of the deaf community on screen, casting deaf actors in deaf roles.