A burning need is the first thing we see in Shaun’s eyes. He needs a father, he needs to be taller and stronger, he needs to dress like the other kids dress, he needs to fit in somewhere.
Shaun, played by Thomas Turgoose in one of those performances that seem more like self-discovery than an act of will, is 12 years old and lives at the shabby end of a town in Yorkshire, not far from the sea. It is July 1983, and his father has been killed in the Falklands War; he takes the death as a kind of betrayal.
There isn’t much money. His mother (Jo Hartley) throws up her hands when he complains about his lack of Doc Martens shoes, without which a boy his age might as well stay home. She sacrifices to buy him some look-alikes, and when he complains, she says they’re better: “These are from London!”
Shaun is always getting beaten up and picked on, until one day he cuts through an underpass and meets a gang of skinheads led by Woody (Joe Gilgun). Woody is friendly. Cheers him up. Tells him he can come around again. Soon Shaun has a new social group and a better self-image, especially when one of the gang girls shaves off his curly hair.
His mother is horrified. She marches Shaun down to the cafe where the gang hangs out, wants to know who did this to her son and asks, “Don’t you think he’s a little young to be hanging around with your lot?” Then, curiously, she leaves Shaun in their care.
Shane Meadows’ “This Is England” focuses on a specific tipping point in the history of English skinheads. As we meet the gang, it is somewhat benign and not racist (Milky, played by Andrew Shim, is Afro-Caribbean). Then Combo (Stephen Graham) is released from prison, and with the lessons he learned there, teaches them violence, looting and racism. When the gang splits in two, Shaun makes the mistake of following Combo.
All of this takes place nearly 25 years ago in England, but it could take place today in any American city. Poverty, absent fathers and dangerous streets make gang membership seem like a safe haven, and soon Shaun is aping the bigger guys, swaggering around, getting in trouble.
Meadows knows this world. The director of such films as “Once Upon a Time in the Midlands” (2003), a portrait of working-class life, he says he was a skinhead at about Shaun’s age. Other films, like Alan Clarke’s “Made in Britain” (1982) also show the attraction to violence that grows in such gangs: Do they hurt and get hurt out of hatred, alienation, fear, or a compulsion to fit into the gang?
The movie is taut, tense, relentless. It shows why Shaun feels he needs to belong to a gang, what he gets out of it and how it goes wrong. It also explains why skinheads are skinheads: Any threatened group has a tendency to adopt various costumes, hair or styles that mark them as members, so they can’t deny it or escape it.
Eventually, skinheads became allied with the neo-Nazi National Front. They became violent toward nonwhites and immigrants. Whenever you see one group demonizing another group, what they charge the others with is often what they fear about themselves. For Shaun, this is more than he was looking for. Better to be lonely than to be deprived of the right to be alone.
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“This Is England”
*** 1/2
R for strong racist violence and language|1 hour, 38 minutes|DRAMA|
Written and directed by Shane Meadows; starring Thomas Turgoose, Joe
Gilgun, Jo Hartley, Andrew Shim and Stephen Graham|Opens today at Landmark’s Esquire Theatre.
