On Screen

THIS IS ENGLAND

Starring Stephen Graham, Thomas Turgoose. Written and directed by Shane Meadows. (18A) 102 min. Opens Nov 9. See Interview page 26.

For a movie so concerned with hate and ignorance, Shane Meadows' This Is England is fuelled by love and memory. It's there in the director's nuanced recreation of street-level skinhead culture, in the way he captures the acceptance and comfort of first rolling with a teenage gang, even in his presentation of the UK Midlands in 1983 – seen as a wasteland ravaged by economic depression, Thatcher and, more personally for the film's young protagonist, the Falklands War, yet also as a place for survivors to band together and cut loose. That he turns this on its ear so dramatically is testament to This Is England's grim realism and its wider criticism of modern British society.

Drawn from Meadows' own experience as a youth, the story follows Shaun (Thomas Turgoose), a troubled 12-year-old who connects with an affable bunch of skinheads. The idyll is disrupted by the return from prison of Combo (Stephen Graham), the gang's former leader and chief badass, who brings with him some new-found white supremacist views (and friends) that rattle the skins' multi-ethnic foundation. Shaun's discovering ska and reggae one week, and the next he's at a National Front meeting.

Like Meadows' previous work (A Room For Romeo Brass, Dead Man's Shoes, Once Upon a Time in the Midlands), the movie hinges on a melodramatic climax that is difficult to digest. Presented with outsized anguish by Graham, there's a surreal note to Combo's psychosis, yet the director and the actor conspire to present him as conflicted by hate that stems from personal grief – a brave move that suggests his victims aren't the only characters who require sympathy. This Is England takes a two-tone world and mashes it into a deep grey.

KIERAN GRANT

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