If nothing else, Shane Meadows' autobiographical This Is England, set not long after the country's 1982 skirmish in the Falkland Islands, will prove eye-opening to those viewers, like myself, whose knowledge of skinhead culture has until now been gleaned largely from Camper van Beethoven songs. We see the movement through the blinkered eyes of twelve-year-old Shaun (Thomas Turgoose), a truculent outcast who's been emotionally unmoored ever since his father was killed in action. Stumbling onto a group of older boys decked out in Ben Sherman button-downs and Doc Martens, who quickly adopt him as a sort of pint-sized mascot, Shaun finds the camaraderie and sense of direction he hadn't realized he needed, forming an especially close bond with genial gang leader Woody (Joseph Gilgun).
But the sudden arrival of ardent National Front supporter Combo (Stephen Graham), newly released from prison and looking to steer his old gang in a more virulent direction, lures the impressionable, angry Shaun to the dark side.
Positioning Woody and Combo as competing surrogate daddies may be a bit schematic, but Meadows clearly wants to emphasize the distinction between the larger, essentially benign skinhead culture, rooted in working-class solidarity and shared fashion sense, and its ugly racist faction, which gets most of the media attention. Emphasis, however, is Meadows' big problem as a filmmaker. Mournful strings accompany Shaun's terror campaign against Pakistani immigrants, lest we mistake this development for something other than tragic, while Combo's ineffectuality in every other aspect of his life is repeatedly underlined and highlighted, ensuring that even the terminally clueless will understand where his anger comes from.
What saves This Is England from becoming just a social-studies lecture is the attention to period detail and the sheer irrepressibility of the performances — this is the first of Meadows' features (that I've seen — I missed A Room for Romeo Brass) to recapture the raw energy and larky spontaneity of early shorts like "Where's the Money Ronnie?" He's found a bold context for them here, too. If only he'd shown a little more trust for his audience's intelligence. — Mike D'Angelo