This Is England

British director Shane Meadows remembers the guilty pleasures of his youth, as evidenced by the opening credits of This Is England. We’re talking vintage footage of ’80s touchstones: Rubik’s Cubes, Knight Rider, New Romantic hairdos, Space Invaders. Only waxing nostalgic isn’t really on the agenda; unlike many current films set during the ’80s, Meadows’s new movie doesn’t seek to fetishize the era’s disastrous fashion and cheesy novelties for giggles. Rather, he explores how a misfit kid stuck in a dead–end environment finds himself in an exotic — and dangerous — subculture too alluring to pass up.

Adolescent Shaun (newcomer Thomas Turgoose) spends his days mourning his dead dad and roaming his northern England neighborhood alone. Then he meets a charismatic skinhead who takes the kid into his gang of merry Two Tone punks. Shaun shaves his skull, adopts the uniform — boots, braces and Ben Sherman shirts — and discovers that listening to ska and trashing empty houses chases the blues away. (Meadows films these scenes of mostly harmless delinquency in a way that emphasizes the wanton, joyous rush of destruction; think A Clockwork Orange — minus the whole rape and assault thing.) Life is peachy until an older skinhead named Combo (Stephen Graham) shows up, complete with “immigrants go home” rants straight from the Fascist 101 handbook. The smart kids split; Shaun, desperate for a father figure, falls under Combo’s spell and ends up paying the price.

Like most boys–to–men stories, This Is England isn’t immune to occasional lapses into sentimentality (the soundtrack’s devolution from Desmond Dekker to tinkling–ivory sonatas is a misstep). Meadows, however, maintains such a fine balance between shepherding the narrative to its inevitable lost–innocence conclusion and exorcising his own youthful demons — the director has said his brief flirtation with the skinhead lifestyle inspired the story — that the film neutralizes any clichés. Even when the violence finally occurs, it isn’t a sensationalistic Romper Stomper set piece, but the kind of short, sharp shock that you’d imagine would have stuck in a young Meadows’s mind.

The director’s heartfelt look at his own bygone wild days is the exact opposite of every slick, generic summer movie in theaters at the moment. To say this sucker punch of a film is just good counter–programming would be to damn it with faint praise. Meadows takes a highly–personal story and turns it into something both awe–inspiring and universal: Sheared hair and Dr. Martens aside, This Is England is at its heart a tale of innocence shattered beyond repair.

Of course, some folks never do let go of the ’80s. Take hot–sauce–company owner Billy Mitchell, one of the subjects in Seth Gordon’s documentary The King of Kong. His mullet alone suggests that he’s still stuck in the Reagan era, but Mitchell is particularly obsessed with 1982, the year he set the world–record high score in Donkey Kong. He parlayed that accomplishment into a tiny empire of celebrity, and his score remained uncontested … until 2003, when Redmond, Washington’s Steve Wiebe broke Mitchell’s hold on the title. Mitchell disputed the legitimacy of Wiebe’s record; Wiebe then challenged Mitchell to a competitive Kong–off, something an arrogant Mitchell went out of his way to avoid. Watching Gordon’s chronicle of two men fighting to be top dog of the retro–game world, you’re never sure whether to laugh at the sheer geekiness on display from those who take this way too seriously or cheer on a battle between a little guy and an egocentric Goliath. You end up doing both, as well as walking away with an appreciation of how hard it is to jump over flaming barrels while facing off against a pixelized ape.

There’s a nostalgia for a different decade in You Kill Me — one in which films involving professional killers and postmodern pulp ruled the land. Seemingly carbon–dated somewhere around 1995, this goons–and–guns fable revolves around a Buffalo, New York, hit man (Sir Ben Kingsley). Only, he’s an alcoholic drying out in San Francisco and in love with a local (Téa Leoni), see? Considering the gangsters–in–therapy thing has been done to death, it was simply a matter of time before we got a movie about a made man in a 12–step program. Thank your own higher power that director John Dahl (The Last Seduction) is calling the shots; he’s able to turn his lead character’s realization that he loves whacking people into an ingenious moment of clarity. A lesser director would have made you pine for the golden age of Tarantino. Dahl’s deft hand places You Kill Me a cut above the usual suspects.