England Is Mine ***½ (2017, Jack Lowden, Jessica Brown Findlay, Jodie Comer) – Movie Review

Co-writer/ director Mark Gill’s portrait of Steven Morrissey and his early life in Seventies Manchester before he became famous as the lead singer of Eighties band The Smiths is a good and thoughtful film, perhaps a very good and very thoughtful film. It is a pleasant surprise.

Jack Lowden does a grand job as Morrissey, nailing him while looking little or nothing like him. The movie brings back the drab and tawdry look and flavour of northern UK in the Seventies for all who lived through the era, or explains it to those who didn’t.

The film co-stars Jessica Brown Findlay as Linder Sterling and Laurie Kynaston as Johnny Marr, with whom Morrissey formed The Smiths in 1982.

Gill’s and William Thacker’s densely packed and emotionally charged screenplay paints Morrissey as passive aggressive – shy, sensitive but vaguely arrogant about himself, his talents, his beliefs, and his poetry, and rude to other people he considers his inferiors, which is most everybody. He has a slight Napoleon complex, as well as being manic depressive, well not very manic of course.

It is bold and brave to make a warts and all film where the main character is not necessarily totally sympathetic, and sometimes just pathetic. Of course, Morrissey is famously miserable, and this has to take that into account – and does fully. Still the writers hold on to it, and eventually swing you onto young Morrissey’s tortured soul side.

The film has the essential poetic element you’d expect, too, from this subject and puts it upfront now and again, without bashing you over the head with it. . It’s a little bit arty, but not too much. Mostly it has its feet on the ground, and gets on with the job in hand, unlike the young Morrissey it portrays, who can’t stick jobs.

And you’d expect the film to be out of the ordinary, and it is. Once or twice, it is really funny, and once or twice it is really quite moving. In between, it stays in the middle lane, Quite Interesting, as Stephen Fry would say.

It is a good, honorable film, with some subtle, understated gay interest. Like young Morrissey, it might have a hard time finding friends, but it will find loyal friends just the same.

It stays as the portrait of the artist as a young man, so that men no Smiths story, and no Smiths music. Instead, we get the songs of the Sixties and Seventies that apparently made Morrissey. This is a most intriguing trip down memory lane even if it’s your first time there.

Did I say it’s nice to have a film about something for a change? It’s nice to have a film about something for a change.

Originally titled Steven, England Is Mine comes from a lyric in The Smiths song Still Ill: ‘England is mine, and it owes me a living.’

Also in the cast are Adam Lawrence as Billy Duffy, Jodie Comer as Christine, Katherine Pearce as Anji Hardie, Peter McDonald as Peter Morrissey, Simone Kirby as Elizabeth Morrissey, Vivienne Bell as Jacqueline Morrissey and Graeme Hawley as Mr Leonard.

© Derek Winnert 2017 Movie Review

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