The setup is pure pulp romance. A man has spent his whole life dreaming of someone. He cannot find her in any bar, on any street or in any town, so he searches the sky. Doval, who is a songwriter, a filmmaker and a man evidently unable to leave a good idea alone, has made the video himself, and he plays the astronaut with the wide-eyed sincerity of someone who has never once been tempted to wink at the camera. Up there on the lunar surface he finds a mysterious robot, falls for her, and carries her home. Whether she survives the return journey is left hanging, with the cruel timing of a cliffhanger from a Saturday morning serial. I confess I sat through the credits like a child told that the next episode wouldn't be on until Thursday.

That sincerity is the key to the whole business. Cynics will reach for the easy joke, and the premise is a gift to them. But rock has never been short of men in silly situations. What it has lacked, for a good twenty years, is men who mean it. Doval means every second of this. The song carries the emotional weight of a writer who has studied heartache closely and decided that the only honest response is to dress it up in a spacesuit.

Then there is the drumming. Pete Parada, lately of The Offspring, is the sort of player who understands that a rocket needs a proper launch, and his playing gives the track its thrust. Where lesser drummers would simply keep time, Parada propels. Anyone who spent their adolescence jumping around to punk records will feel the old muscle memory twitch. His presence lends the song a ballast of genuine rock credentials, which in turn gives Doval the freedom to float off into the cinematic and the strange. It is a shrewd partnership, and the two men sound like they are enjoying each other's company.

The video deserves its own paragraph, and indeed its own retrospective, for its handmade glory. This is the work of a man with more than twenty-five promos behind him, and it shows in the confidence of the storytelling. The budget is clearly not NASA's, and the film is better for it. A cardboard-and-ingenuity charm runs through it that recalls Georges Méliès, Joe Meek's tea-chest cosmos and the glorious tackiness of vintage British sci-fi, when the monsters wobbled and the hearts were enormous. Today's slick, focus-grouped pop spectacles could learn a good deal from a man who simply picked up a camera and told the story he wanted to tell.

It would be easy to dismiss all this as a curiosity from the independent fringe, and that would be a mistake. Doval has six albums behind him, a clutch of imaginative videos, and a song due to appear in a Hollywood feature. He is plainly not a dabbler. "Rocket to the Moon" feels like an artist hitting his stride, at ease with his obsessions and willing to risk looking ridiculous in pursuit of something tender.

The best pop has always been a little absurd. It reaches for the stars with clumsy hands and occasionally grabs one. This is a love song, a short film and a boy's own adventure in one tidy package, and it ends on a question that lingers after the last chord has faded. Does she make it back to Earth? I have my theory. I won't spoil it. I will say that I played it three times in a row, and I suspect you will too.

Launch it immediately.