18, 97mins

The news clips that open Shane Meadows’s skinhead film This is England are a perfect mix of tabloid nostalgia and absurd TV. What a weird and unpleasant land Britain was in the early 1980s. Shots of unemployed miners, National Front marches, Roland Rat and the royal wedding are cut to perfection over a vintage ska track by Toots and the Maytals. Headlines about the storming of the Iranian Embassy, Green-ham Common and the Falklands conflict are jumbled up with nerds playing Space Invaders and grappling with Rubik cubes.

This is the England that 12-year-old Shaun (wonderfully played by Thomas Turgoose) inherits in 1983. He is a surly misfit on a northern council estate. His father has returned from the Falklands in a body bag. His grieving mother has neither the confidence nor cash to fill the awful void. Shaun is bullied at school for his secondhand clothes. The boy aches for some control. He aches for people to talk to.

This neediness results in deep trouble when he is adopted by a gang of local skinheads whose loyalties are subsequently poisoned by a racist nutter. What makes the film such compelling drama is how familiar the landscape is almost 25 years on. Britain is stuck in another (bigger) war. Gun violence is increasing. Nerds have discovered the iPod and the Nintendo DS. The Iranians are back in the bad books.

I don’t think that Meadows set out to shoot a state-of-the-nation parable. He set out to explore a contradiction within skinhead culture: the tribal dislike of foreigners, and the diehard allegiance to Jamaican ska music.

Yet it’s clear that This is England is much bigger than this irony. The script is torn directly from Meadows’s own experience of growing up on a council estate in Uttoxeter. Like Shaun, his social life was transformed by shaving his hair off. In the film, the genial leader of the local gang, Woody (Joe Gilgun), is amused by the boy’s gloomy wit and moved by his anguish. Shaun is adopted by this motley crew and is empowered by his new uniform and older friends. Even his mother is impressed.

The gang are civil if not exactly angelic. They smash up empty council houses for fun, and get stoned while listening to records. But they are not inclined to violence.

This bliss comes to an abrupt end when a virulently racist gang member called Combo (Stephen Graham) arrives fresh from prison like Ray Winstone in Scum. He is demented. He sees a younger and purer version of himself in Shaun and the ease with which the boy is beguiled by Combo’s anger and politics is a social worker’s nightmare. The violence is only a matter of time. It’s a hair-raising performance by Graham.

Few directors tap their damaged past as brilliantly as Meadows. This is England is by far his most personal and powerful testimony.

For more visit www.thisisenglandmovie.co.uk

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