England Is Mine (15)
THE Sex Pistols’ legendary concert at Manchester’s Free Trade Hall in 1976 not only spawned a generation of Manchester bands, but has indirectly led to three exemplary feature films about the era, each of which presents the gig as a seminal moment. A triple bill beckons.
First there was Michael Winterbottom’s raucously entertaining 24 Hour Party People, which focused on Tony Wilson’s creation of Factory Records and his relationship with its signature bands New Order and Happy Mondays. Then came Anton Corbijn’s darker biopic Control, about the brief career, tortured private life and suicide of Joy Division’s Ian Curtis. And now there's England Is Mine, about another young chap present at the Free Trade Hall and who, inimitably, took inspiration through the belief that he could do better: Morrissey.
Like Control, the new film is less the standard rock biopic than a portrait of a troubled young man, whose personal demons threaten to obstruct his creative potential. With his confident first feature, writer/director Mark Gill shows Morrissey on stage just once – and that isn’t even with The Smiths. It’s a bold step, and one that opens the film to non-Smiths fans while still appealing to the aficionados.
What Gill has done is create a potent snapshot of late 1970s and early 1980s Britain, a dour time of high unemployment and social malaise, at its centre an intelligent and ambitious young man desperate to break out of the national rut. The film also offers the third performance in a month by Jack Lowden, after the golfing film Tommy’s Honour and the blockbuster war movie Dunkirk. The young Scot is fast becoming one of the UK’s most appealing and versatile performers.
It opens in 1976, with the teenage Steven Morrissey (Lowden) dreaming of being a singer in a band but impotent to do anything about it. His parents having separated, he lives at home with his mother, a librarian, and sister. With the family in need of money, he takes a mind-numbing, pen-pushing job with the Inland Revenue. At night he goes to see bands, afterwards scribbling angry letters to the music press about their mediocrity.
Yet, despite constantly listening to music, and writing, he is incapable of giving it a go himself. One girlfriend leaves him with the words: “Call me when you’ve grown a pair.”
Gill, co-writer William Thacker and Lowden present an introverted loner, perhaps worn down by a childhood of bullying, his scribblings revealing the conflict between melancholy (“life in its humdrum sense is worth avoiding”) and narcissism. It’s a portrait that could be divisive, as Morrissey himself has always been. But the actor lends his characterisation an underlying sweetness and humour that keeps the more galling aspects in check.
The film also charts the relationships that will give the nascent pop star the necessary push: with his mother (Simone Kirby), other musicians, and particularly platonic best friend Linder Sterling (Jessica Brown Findlay) an artist who shares the same love of books and renegade nature, but has much more drive. And then there’s a lad named Johnny Marr, floating in the background for most of the film, the elusive piece of the puzzle that will allow Morrissey to finally express himself.
Gill economically captures the beige drabness of the period, along with the spectrum of sartorial disasters that took place. One impressive sequence accumulates the physical spaces that dominate Morrissey’s youth, which he needs to escape but in some way inform his creative sensibility. Just as the film leaves the story of The Smiths as it’s about to begin, there’s a sense that the director has his own highly promising career ahead of him.
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