When it comes to music festivals, we tend to only remember the highs – so let new comedy The Festival remind you what you’re not missing. Partly filmed at last year’s Leeds festival, it is brought to you by the makers of The Inbetweeners movies and stars Joe Thomas, which should already give you a clue: long drops, mud, bodily fluids, crowds, anxiety, confusion. “I just want to go home, have a proper shower and a poo,” says Thomas in the trailer. This is the festival experience as it really is – somewhere between a dream trip and a prison sentence. But, so often, cinema fails to capture that spirit.

You can see why the setting appeals to film-makers: spectacle, energy, youth, a cast of thousands – none of which you had to engineer yourself. But the key danger of using a music festival as a backdrop is that it is more interesting than the frontdrop. That has been the case with recent efforts such as last year’s Access All Areas, a well-intentioned “let’s run away to the festival” movie piggybacking off Bestival. Meanwhile, David “Hell Or High Water” Mackenzie gave us You Instead, which used the hokey device of handcuffing a guy and girl together at Scotland’s T in the Park for a day. Nevada’s famed Burning Man generally refuses film-makers permission to use it as a backdrop, but they made an exception for 2017’s The Girl from the Song, a sort of Orpheus and Eurydice reworking with Black Rock City as the underworld. Seeing the film felt “really weird”, said Burning Man’s organisers. It “confirmed our belief that Black Rock City just isn’t an appropriate place to shoot fiction films”. They promised never to let it happen again.

Earlier generations recognised that the music was the story and there was no point competing. Classic 1960s rockumentaries make us feel as if we’re in the crowd, because that’s what the film-makers felt like, from DA Pennebaker’s Monterey Pop to the Maysles brothers’ Gimme Shelter and Michael Wadleigh’s Woodstock. The same could not be said for highbrow auteurs such as the elusive Terrence Malick, who broke cover for just long enough to film the likes of Michael Fassbender and Rooney Mara out at Austin’s City Limits festival for Song to Song. The film felt like an interminable guitar solo: long and dull. Even worse was Ang Lee, whose rightly forgotten Taking Woodstock managed to turn the greatest cultural moment of the late-20th century into a saga of events management. These were festival movies by people who had clearly never seen the inside of a long drop. At least that can’t be said of The Festival.

So here are a few rules of thumb for making a festival film: stay safe, stay hydrated and, unless you’re prepared to get your hands dirty, stay at home.

The Festival is in UK cinemas from 14 August