Actor Timothy Spall won plaudits and awards for playing the great British painter JMW Turner on the big screen. The 2014 film, Mr Turner, was partly set in Margate, and it brought the artist’s vision of the seaside town to a wider audience, boosting its cultural status. Now Spall has taken on the role of another favourite British artist, LS Lowry, and residents of the painter’s former home town, Salford, are hoping for a similar effect.

“Salford is increasingly a creative hub and Lowry’s unique view of the city and the region still resonates locally and internationally. We are proud of that,” said Salford city councillor Stephen Coen, who plans to install a series of lifesize Lowry-style steel figures in public locations.

The artist, he feels, “captured the working-class industrial heritage” of the area. “We want to tap into our creative sector and bring aspects of his work to the public in various ways,” said Coen. “A silhouette walking to the Manchester United ground on the Trafford Road, perhaps, as featured in his painting Going to the Match?”

The Lowry gallery in the Quays, which features in the moving closing scenes of the film, Mrs Lowry & Son, is also preparing for an influx of visitors. “We’re excited about Mrs Lowry & Son hitting the big screen and about the interest it will drum up,” said Julia Fawcett, the gallery’s chief executive. “We’re working with the producer to pay tribute to the film in our permanent exhibition, LS Lowry: The Art & the Artist. Forty-three years after his death, Lowry continues to make headlines, be it multimillion-pound auctions of his work, a campaign to have him feature on the new £20 bank note – to which he was pipped by Turner – or in this case the release of a major film.”

Adrian Noble, director of the film, believes Lowry’s artistry still has the ability to change perceptions. “You see the world differently because of him,” said Noble, a former artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, this weekend. “One of the great functions of art is that it lets you look at things again. There is a kind of morality in the way Lowry does this.”

But will a second virtuoso performance as a painter from Spall really help people to recognise the beauty Lowry once saw in the city? The owner of the artist’s former Pendlebury home doubts the council will act in time to capitalise.

“They have not done anything so far. If you go to other towns they actually celebrate their famous people,” said Steve Johnson, who lives with his family in the terraced Station Road house that Lowry once shared with his mother, Elizabeth, for 40 years. Johnson is raising funds for a bronze statue of the painter for his front garden. “There should be something to tell people about him and if the council won’t do it, then we are trying to,” he said. A heritage plaque outside the house was stolen a few years ago, but there is a statue of Lowry sitting on a bench in nearby Mottram in Longdendale, where he lived from 1948 until his death.

The film, a screen adaptation of Martyn Hesford’s play, also stars Vanessa Redgrave as Lowry’s overbearing mother. It concentrates on the last claustrophobic years they spent together in the Pendlebury house they bought in 1908.

A rent collector, Lowry studied art at night, tutored by the French impressionist Adolphe Valette. Once his disapproving mother had fallen asleep each night, he would go upstairs to paint into the early hours of the morning, using both ends of his brushes, his fingers and a limited palette of six colours – ivory, black, vermillion, Prussian blue, yellow ochre and flake white.

“He is a riddle to me in many ways,” said Noble, “and the film does not try to entirely solve it. It’s about the life of an artist. But I do try to develop the notion he found some artistic freedom in the attic and when he was walking about Salford.”

Elizabeth Lowry became depressed and bedridden after the death of her husband and Lowry cared for her until her death in 1939, just before his talent won recognition.

“One of the attractions for me was this extraordinary story of someone so original and gifted, hidden from the world for such a long time,” said Noble. “He was effectively in an abusive relationship that prevented him from sharing his art. He became almost a full-time carer and she quite consciously tried to stifle his talent.”

Born in 1887 in Stretford, Laurence Stephen Lowry spent his early years in some comfort in Victoria Park, Rusholme. But when he was 22 financial problems forced the family to move to Pendlebury. At first he said he “detested it”, but this emotion later grew into a form of artistic obsession with the look of the people, the factories and the chimneys he now found on his doorstep.

“We used some film trickery to show some of the views that inspired Lowry,” said Noble. “I moved the location of one or two things to where I knew I could create something authentic.”

Hesford grew up just streets away from Lowry’s home and Noble believes the script has caught the cadences of the language of the area perfectly. He, too, would like to see more acknowledgment of the painter’s unorthodox talent.

“A new plaque on the Pendlebury home would be a good thing,” he said. “I think there are some vestiges of snobbery about Lowry still, especially in the art world.”

In the film Lowry’s mother poignantly wonders who will remember that either of them existed, two lonely people, once they are dead and their house has been forgotten. The painter reassures her that it will all still be there, contained in his paintings.

Mrs Lowry & Son has its world premiere on 30 June at the Edinburgh international film festival and will go on general release in August.

Famous frames

Coming from the Mill (1930)
The mill near Lowry’s old home is now demolished but the scene is recreated in the new film.

The Cripples (1949)
The physical frailties of those who lived and worked around Pendlebury were a regular subject.

Going to the Match (1953)
This view of supporters approaching a football ground is owned by the Professional Footballers’ Association.

Going to work (1959)
The “matchstick” factory workers of Salford are bent against the wind on Lowry’s trademark “flake white” background.