★★★☆☆
You don’t have to possess an obsessive knowledge of the early life, musical influences and chart hits of the Mancunian pop icon Morrissey to appreciate England is Mine. But it helps. As it happens, I do (more than 30 years of mostly unwavering devotion in the tank), so perhaps I can comprehend the ambitions of the writer-director Mark Gill better than many.
The film attempts to describe the formative, entirely dull life of Steven Patrick Morrissey before he became the flower-flailing face of the Smiths and subsequently a globetrotting solo star (he is, bizarrely, very big in Mexico).
Trapped, like Morrissey, in the limited grimness of 1970s rain-sodden suburbia, with little narrative momentum (Morrissey moans a lot and wants to be famous, and that’s it), it envisages biographical scenarios that might soon inform his classic songs.
There’s the nightclub scene from How Soon Is Now (“So you go and you stand on your own/ And you leave on your own”), the maudlin walks from Cemetry Gates (“A dreaded sunny day/ So I meet you at the cemetery gates”), and the fairground altercations from Rusholme Ruffians (“A boy is stabbed/ And his money is grabbed”).
Which is all lovely. And I know I had a blast. But if you’re not a Smiths/Morrissey devotee there can surely be only ambivalence. Watching someone incessantly scribble in notepads while complaining, “I’m sick of being an undiscovered genius,” can get you only so far.
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Tellingly, you are left with the impression that the rising star Jack Lowden has just done a pitch-perfect Morrissey impression, if not quite a characterisation. Morrissey has been an elusive figure all his life, and he has certainly eluded this film.
15, 94min