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Beautifully structured and produced, stuffed with satisfying little nuggets of information on the partnership between legendary directors Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, Emmanuel Laurent’s Two In The Wave is a great example of how to put together a populist documentary on a fairly highbrow subject. It doesn’t go for any especially incisive analysis, plus it’s a little too obvious – as a French production – the film is falling over itself to paint its subjects and their friendship as part tragic martyrs, part national heroes, part history of two modern-day saints. Still, even for those with little or no interest in their output, it’s a hugely entertaining and ultimately surprisingly moving watch.

Bookended by the final shot from Truffaut’s famous debut 400 Blows (it doesn’t spoil anything, for the wary) Two In The Wave properly gets under way with the film’s rapturous reception at Cannes 1959. Hailed as a reinvention of a national cinema Truffaut and Godard’s generation felt had grown stale and hidebound under an autocratic critical system, it dominated newspaper headlines and discussion in the renowned magazine Cahiers Du Cinema. Writing for Cahiers, Truffaut had upset the establishment so much he was banned from Cannes 1958 – now, a year later, he was the festival’s golden boy.

Truffaut went on to help Godard, whose work was also published in Cahiers, to stardom with his own debut, Breathless. Using his new-found fame to convince producer Georges Beauregard to take a chance on the script, the resulting feature also made cinematic history as between them, the two men became the catalyst that launched the New Wave in French cinema. Both films were hailed as the epitome of cool – Breathless in a more literal sense, the first film to come up with a perfect encapsulation of a younger generation in thrall to Americana yet, through that adulation, voicing a need for change their elders could never quite understand.

But what we’d think of as the backlash against the New Wave kicked in surprisingly fast as the cinema-going public began to find it confusing, even alienating. While the movement became steadily more influential it was increasingly obvious it wasn’t about to tear down the established order overnight. Both men’s follow-ups failed to live up to people’s expectations. Truffaut’s experimental gangster flick Shoot The Piano Player flopped at the box office and Godard’s The Little Soldier, dealing with French military involvement in Algeria, was banned by the government for several years.

While each began to move in different directions from this point on – Godard fiercely dedicated to advancing his philosophical and political beliefs, Truffaut the more reflective cineaste – what really drove a wedge between them was the famous May 1968 protest movement, when millions of workers took to the streets in protest at the policies of Charles de Gaulle’s government. Both directors marched alongside their contemporaries, but these events resonated far more with Godard, who decided from that point on there was little or no worth in cinema that didn’t consciously stand up behind an issue, be it political, moral or anything else.