This is England

Directed by Shane Meadows

Named after one of the last bitter singles by The Clash, Shane Meadows’ This is England confronts British skinhead culture partly to assess the state of British social life, but it eventually quotes the melancholy yearning of The Smiths’ “Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want This Time.” Like those two classic recordings, Meadows’ film isn’t only politically aware; it’s also concerned with young peoples’ personal awareness. The trenchant combination makes for a truly great subject.

It is 1983 and Meadows’ protagonist, 12-year-old Shaun (Thomas Turgoose), is a sleepy-eyed, tow-headed kid with an unusually large front tooth. Yes, he’s appetitive but also traumatized by his father’s recent death in the Falklands War. The difficulty of being poor—particularly at that transitional teenage moment when style and popularity crucially effect a sense of self—makes Shaun a perfect representation of the tensions heard in that period’s outstanding British pop music.

Set in the Midlands region, This is England isn’t a style-obsessed London story. It’s about Shaun’s timeless, small-town confusion. Meadows shows the frustration that occurs in the shadows of big-city pop and much of the film’s richness comes from capturing the specifics of that circumstance and that era. England’s multiracial tumult is established with intricate, seemingly first-hand recall: an introductory montage of 1980s British news events, scored to Toots & the Maytal’s “54-46 was My Number.” Shaun is helpless to understand this complex world, a mix of war, privilege and cultural contradiction; instead, the fatherless boy and his peers grasp for fashion, slang and hipness.

Shaun is befriended by Woody (Joe Gilgun), a tall, skinny, older teen, the wittiest of a bored group with shaved heads who wear cuffed jeans, Ben Sherman shirts, suspenders and Doc Martens boots. Everything they do is focused on the moment (nicely conveyed when they think twice after Shaun’s mother objects to them cutting his hair). But Meadows realizes that innocently doing dumb stuff is also, inescapably, political. Their energy goes into roughhousing, deriding each other and vandalizing disused housing projects and meeting halls—this blind assault on social decay seems automatically symbolic, reminiscent of the dilapidated play spaces in David Gordon Green’s similarly trenchant George Washington.

Meadows has a casually spectacular style; replete with period details but brisk camerawork (by Danny Cohen) of documentary immediacy. This is a nimble variation on Mike Leigh’s technique: half-improvised and committed to working-class psychodynamics. As in his neglected 2000 film, A Room for Romeo Brass, Meadows distills world crisis to the small world of a hinterlands teen: Shaun’s participation in skinhead rebellion, including grim flirtation with the National Front movement, has all the signs of a high-concept. The awkward, desperate need to belong explains his affection for Woody’s aimless crew, including Woody’s punk-styled dramatically beautiful girlfriend Lol (Vicky McClure), but this makeshift family collapses when an even older youth, Combo (Stephen Graham), suddenly appears, straight out of prison. Combo picked up the harsh, white-supremacist indoctrination that feeds his resentment about doing time, England’s changing empire and his own misdirected youth; his personal tragedy reflects Shaun’s undisciplined need for companionship and a role model.

Bullet-headed Combo is also high-concept, but Graham plays the role stunningly, internalizing befuddlement and

jealousy and acting-out dumb rage (Paddy Considine was similarly striking in Romeo Brass). Although Combo shifts interest away from Shaun, Meadows doesn’t stay with this richer insight as he should. Combo reminisces about the origins of the skinhead movement involving both blacks and whites searching for a style haven, grooving to Percy Sledge’s “Dark End of the Street.” (“Your uncle introduced me to that,” Combo sneers at a black mate.) This connects social unease to cultural expression in an uncanny way. His misery and displacement are so alien to mainstream bromides that the only way left to understand it is to reinvestigate the most genuine and inspired pop music.

What’s now poignant about songs by The Clash, The Smiths and Morrissey’s “The National Front Disco” and “A Swallow on My Neck” (describing a tattoo like Combo’s) is the evidence that politics is often over the heads of youth. Meadows pinpoints the post-punk generation as a literal backwash—kids newly stranded by earlier styles of rebellion. He visualizes this in resonant scenes of little white-boy Shaun singing “Pressure Drop” and collages of Shaun and Combo walking among super-impositions of dark clouds and graffiti. After making these expressive allusions, Meadows’ narrative subsides. But This is England remains genuinely political and movingly personal. So it’s only a half-great film, which is to say that its best moments are more perceptive and powerful than any other movie this summer.