Football nostalgia doesn’t come any louder or more arrogant than Brian Clough, which is why Tom Hooper’s film about Clough’s 44 doomed days in charge of Leeds United FC is an acquired taste. You either loved Old Big ’Ead or you loathed him. For those of us who could decline the entire Leeds team in Latin from the age of 6, Clough was a hair-raising liability.

The Damned Utd, David Peace’s controversial book about Clough’s reign at the club, is the 1974 edition of King Lear: a great man pushes his best friend over a cliff, etc. The surprise of the film is how much more magnetic Clough is in the flesh: if the book focuses on his acrid heart of darkness, the film is its intriguing light counterpoint.

Michael Sheen is magnificent as the hotshot young manager who swaggers his way in to the biggest job in football. His star team look as if they’ve just wandered out of a pub. What makes Peter Morgan’s adaptation of Peace’s book so gritty and nostalgic is that it’s styled as a vintage Play for Today. Not only does the entire team chain-smoke, they have no intention of training. Morgan puts you in Clough’s boots.

For dazzling minutes we think and feel like Sheen: the eyes twinkle; the slow northern voice acquires a razor’s edge; the quiff is pure Elvis. Is he the greatest manager in England? “I don’t know, but I’m in the top one,” Clough drawls without batting an eyelid.

The disconcerting detail is how little real football action there actually is. Clough’s rise and fall is crunched into changing-room moments. Sheen’s best scenes are when he is alone in a concrete room, listening to the distant choruses of despair or triumph coming from the stadium above his head. The old- fashioned point of The Damned United is that it’s a psychological thriller.

The mind games are in full ugly flow when Clough takes Derby County from provincial nobodies to champions of England. It makes the cocky manager a mortal foe of Colm Meaney’s marvellously grumpy Don Revie, the legend who preceded Clough at Leeds.

Wearing his hubris like armour, Clough makes himself an instant hate figure at Leeds when he tells his team to chuck all their medals in the bin because they “won them by cheating”. It’s fantastic theatre and a madly rash pronouncement, even if one forgets how truly vicious the Leeds team were under Revie.

The unpredictable genius of Clough was that no one had a clue what might pop out of his mouth. In Hooper’s film you never know whether Clough is having a laugh or being deadly serious during boardroom showdowns with the cigar-smoking, out-of-touch Derby governors such as Sam Longson (Jim Broadbent). Or whether he’s lost his marbles when he goes toe-to-toe with professional bruisers such as Johnny Giles (Peter McDonald), Billy Bremner (Stephen Graham) and Norman Hunter (Mark Cameron).

What takes everyone by embarrassed surprise — notably Clough’s family, who have famously cold-shouldered the film — is that The Damned United is an improbable northern love story. For all the clever ways it rolls back our yesterdays, the film hinges on Clough’s surprisingly tender relationship with the only man who had a genuinely selfless interest in his career — his coach Peter Taylor (played with labrador loyalty by Timothy Spall).

For this simple reason the film is probably not everyone’s romantic cup of tea. Ultimately The Damned United celebrates Clough as a tragic clown who ditched his best friend rather than as an heroic maverick. But anyone who has ever kicked a leather football in anger — when they were brown, permanently sodden and weighed 10lb — will almost certainly love this.

15, 93mins

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