The troubled (but likeable) kids of This Is England

Writer-director Shane Meadows’s This Is England begins with a montage of England, circa 1983—Princess Di’s wedding and Margaret Thatcher clash with images of riots, punks, and the Falkland war, all to the sound of Toots and the Maytals’ reggae standard “54-46 That’s My Number.” Meadows’s England is atomized and in decline: postindustrial, postcolonial, its peeling paint and graffiti the scars of economic and sociopolitical distress.

Twelve-year-old Shaun Fields (Thomas Turgoose), who lost his father to the Falklands war, lives alone with his mother in a run-down Nottingham flat. He’s lonely and picked on at school, so he’s happy to be adopted by a gang of relatively harmless skinheads—working class, not racist—led by the charismatic Woody (Joseph Gilgun) and rounded out by Jamaican-descended Milky and gawky new-waver Smell. The gang gets into little more summer trouble than drinking, vandalizing an abandoned flat, and loitering in a cafe. And though Shaun’s mother chides them for shaving his head, she’s ultimately relieved to have him in their care.

But when older skinhead Combo returns from prison a supporter of the protofascist National Front, he crashes the party and divides the group in half. Woody and Milky want nothing to do with Combo, while Shaun finds him a compelling father figure and becomes his accomplice in a series of increasingly violent and racist crimes, culminating with a brutal beating.

The story arc is fairly predictable (of course Shaun is going to renounce his misdeeds) and occasionally melodramatic, but it’s not without moments of brilliance—the gang’s goofy “hunting” expedition, Shaun and Smell’s first kiss, Combo and Milky’s tensely shared joint—and the gifted ensemble cast shine throughout. In the face of an especially dreary reality, This Is England reveals the foolish audacity and terrible need to belong that mark all youth.

THIS IS ENGLAND DIR. SHANE MEADOWS | UNRATED | AT SELECT THEATERS IN LA AND OC

Tags: Film, this is england, uk