It’s 1983, Thatcher is in power and Shaun is 12, recently bereaved after his Dad is killed in the Falklands.
Teased at school, he is taken up by a local gang, seemingly benign skinheads who invite him into their gang and introduce him to parties, girls and a sense of belonging.
Meadows returns to familiar territory touched upon in A Room for Romeo Brass of lonely youth catapulted into a new world of adult camaraderie where casual violence is never far from the surface.
This is an adult and assured film, mature and complex, semi-autobiographical and with a real sense of time and place, an England which is a mass of contradiction and ambivalence.
Newcomer Thomas Turgoose is the central moral force at its core, turning in a fabulous performance as Shaun, always engaging our empathy as he learns to grow up fast in a world he doesn’t quite understand and can’t control.
