Sweden's Lukas Moodysson scored a likable crossover hit with his 2000 comedy Together, about 1970s commune living, but later veered off into dark, experimental realms so confrontationally outre that they made Lars von Trier look like Ron Howard. In We Are the Best!, he unexpectedly rediscovers his sense of fun, with a teen-feminist tale set in Stockholm in 1982, about three girls – two of them 12, one slightly older – who form a punk band, with just one song to their name. It's a good one, though, a cri de coeur against sport with lyrics that, in translation, demonstrate the glory of the subtitler's art: "The atomic bombs blow up our cities, yet you want more tennis committees!"

Adapted from a comic strip by the director's wife Coco Moodysson, We Are the Best! smacks of lived experience with all its awkward nostalgia and remembered embarrassment – Coco herself presumably being the model for gauche, bespectacled Bobo (Mira Barkhammar). Mira Grosin is spiky-haired and spiky-souled as Klara, the political proto-riot grrrl, while Liv LeMoyne, as a shy Christian guitarist who undergoes a punk conversion, gives her all to the role by getting her hair radically shorn on screen. They all seem to play their instruments for real too – LeMoyne super-adeptly, the other two with convincing clunkiness – and Moodysson clearly has as much boisterous pleasure directing the girls as they do in letting rip with their characters.

We Are the Best! is brisk, authentically snotty stuff, with nice barbs at the expense of self-indulgent ex-hippy parents, lumbering heavy metallists and pompous youth workers. Moodysson is on livelier and more cogent form than he has been for ages, although it's hard now to imagine the excitement he once stirred when Ingmar Bergman acclaimed him as his true inheritor.