The  County Adaptation Film Festival is back, and opens its second outing with a special screening at The Regent Theatre of The Penguin Lessons.

The evening will also give a preview of some of the themes and programming of the full three-day film festival the last weekend of September.

CAFF explores the writing that goes on behind the scenes to adapt a novel or short story for film. Based on the bestselling memoir by Tom Michell, The Penguin Lessons is set in the middle of the Argentinian coup d’etat of 1976, which established a military dictatorship.

It follows a bitter, disengaged, and lonely English teacher — “I’m  like Hemingway, just with no money,” he says. “And no books”  — at a fancy boys boarding school. He rescues the sole survivor of a raft of penguins hit with an oil slick. 

The penguin refuses to be left behind after that, and, despite his best efforts, Mr. Michell becomes attached.

He brings the penguin back to the school, and introduces him to the Lower Fourth Reform, a class as bad as it sounds, full of young louts determined to learn nothing. Reform indeed ensues, however. If the boys don’t quite learn what it is to care, they at least start to take turns.

If all of this sounds unbearable, fear not. Steve Coogan is infamous now for The Trip, which spun off into a series of hilarious, semi-improvised British road trip films he made with Rob Brydon and director Michael Winterbottom. He is a gifted comic actor; his facial expressions alone are enough to rescue the treacly plot.

Meanwhile, the film slowly becomes more serious. The military presence in the background suggests a dislocated world; it is a version of the oil slick that trapped our penguin. Horrific, unfair, yet somehow to be lived through — and if not fully survived, at least accommodated.

A key scene involves an activist, a friend of Mr. Michell’s, being “disappeared” off the street by two unidentified men, members of some sort of military gestapo, who stuff her into a car.

The overlaps between the takeover of 1970s Argentina by a military dictatorship and current events in the United States, where masked agents from ICE are attacking residents with no due process, or even warrants, make this a film for the moment. It does not make too many false promises. Pain lurks around its edges, kept at bay only with effort.