‘This is England’ bristles with strong rendering of skinhead milieu

Published 4:36 pm Thursday, September 6, 2007

Northern England, 1983: This is the richly remembered setting for a new film by Shane Meadows. “This is England” follows the bumpy road of a 12-year-old kid named Shaun, played in one of those great kid performances by Thomas Turgoose.

Shaun recently lost his father in the Falklands War. The war plays a large role in the movie, even if it’s happening half a world away.

Rootless and upset, Shaun falls in with a group of older skinheads not the racist kind, but the kind that care about what brand of shoes and shirts they’re wearing. Suddenly, this is the family Shaun’s been craving.

But into that family comes an angry bull named Combo (the electric Stephen Graham), who’s the sort of bad father figure Shaun can’t help gravitating toward. Combo’s just been sprung from jail, where he’s adopted an England-for-the-English, anti-immigrant code. So Combo starts his own gang, and mascot Shaun is enlisted.

Meadows himself had some experiences in the skinhead life when he was an adolescent, so he’s got the milieu and the language down cold. More importantly, he understands the psychological landscape: what the effects of unarticulated anger are, and how a good, smart kid might fall in with exactly the wrong crowd.

The film’s frequent newsreel clips of the war and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher leave no doubt that Meadows wants us to recognize this story within a historical context. He’s clearly skeptical about the idea of English nationalism, and its appeal to the disenfranchised.

The soundtrack is crammed with vintage Brit-pop songs from the era, from bands such as The Specials and Soft Cell. The Jamaican sounds of Toots and the Maytals also course through, as though in ironic counterpoint to Combo’s England-first sentiments.

Meadows previously made films such as “A Room for Romeo Brass” and “Once Upon a Time in the Midlands,” tough little numbers that focus on the lives of lower-class citizens north of London. This may be his best film, although he’s always been good with actors (especially of the coiled-intensity variety).

Nowhere is that better displayed than in his work with young Thomas Turgoose, a newcomer who gets everything right. Stephen Graham, on the other hand, is a veteran of Brit films, and he burns through this role like a young Bob Hoskins, or possibly a young Bob Hoskins who’s been caged up without food for a week. The dude is scary.

A scene from “This is England.”