This Is England (18)

The writer/director Shane Meadows revisits his own skinhead youth in This Is England, an affecting but uneven memoir of council-estate Britain in the summer of 1983. Shaun (Thomas Turgoose) is a lonely, pie-faced 12-year-old who can't get through a school-day without being mocked for his flares, and picked on because his dad is not around. He is adopted as a mascot by Woody, the leader of a gang of local skinheads, gets his head shaved, and discovers that life can be sweet even in the blighted East Midlands. Ben Sherman shirts and braces are part of it, but mainly it's to do with the aggressive camaraderie of his gangmates and some friendly snogs.

Meadows is acute on the pubescent boy's need to belong and on the crucial importance of tribal wear - there's one lovely scene in which Shaun's mum takes him to a shoe-shop and tries to cajole him out of choosing ox-blood Doc Martens boots - but one senses that the innocence of this coming-of-age story can't last. The mood changes drastically upon the arrival of a charismatic scouser, Combo (Stephen Graham), hot from jail and eager to co-opt the gang into the National Front. Loyalties are split down the middle, not least because one of the group, Milky, is black, and Shaun is forced to decide which of his older-brother figures he should espouse as mentor.

This second half shifts the emphasis towards the psychopathology of Combo, whose blistering rages Graham inhabits as if his whole acting life had led to this moment. If Meadows is emulating Alan Clarke's 1983 movie Made in Britain, Graham is echoing its star, Tim Roth, as the vicious delinquent. For all the snarling Rottweiler moments, however, his best scene occurs when he tries to woo his ex-girlfriend, Lol, and quietly endures a bitter rejection. Much less successful is the film's attempt to equate male aggression with larger issues of military domination, a parallel also fudged in last year's The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael. Meadows keeps flashing to news footage from the Falklands conflict, as if to explain British malehood's eternal need to kick the shit out of someone. There are two problems with this; the first a prosaic one of timing: the war was fought in 1982, not 1983, as Meadows seems to think. The second, and more crucial, is that the violence of a psychopathic thug cannot be taken as emblematic of an army's, still less a nation's, will to fight.

On a technical note, This Is England is beset with the usual flaw of Meadows's film-making: his uncertainty with actors. The performances are mixed, with some responding to the loose, improvisational atmosphere better than others. Turgoose is a real find, but many of the ensemble scenes look awkward.