Film Review: England Is Mine (2017)

Jack Lowden as Morrissey.

Most music biopics rise and fall on the strength of their leads capturing the essence of a performer, not a simple impersonation or caricature, which would be so easy to fall into. But then, this film’s focus is on the early days of a man who eschewed empty cliches, forever breaking the macho mould for pop stars: Morrissey.

Linder and Steven at the cemetery gates.

Director Mark Gill’s film about a pre-fame Morrissey works pretty well, given none of the cast look like who they’re portraying. Jack Lowden as the young, painfully awkward Steven Patrick Morrissey isn’t as angular, but does capture his slouch and bitter eloquence, as he types out streams of invective regarding Manchester’s moribund music scene. All of these letters are published by the NME. It’s through his dismissive rants that he meets his best friend, artist Linder Sterling (Jessica Brown Findlay) who, the film suggests, is the catalyst for catapulting him out of boring jobs and into the music scene. She’s the extrovert to his introvert, the talented art student who introduces him to gifted guitarist Billy Duffy (Adam Lawrence) of punk band The Nosebleeds and more famously, later, The Cult.

What follows is the usual near misses and quotidian workplace frustration, with relief found at punk gigs and record shops. ‘Kiling Eve”s Jodie Comer gives an amusing turn as Christine, the office airhead at the Inland Revenue, who epitomises everything the young Moz is against: fashion, ignorance and a complete lack of ambition.

With its muted colour palette and general sense of thwarted plans and teenage frustration, Gill deftly encapsulates not only the textures of The Smiths, but the grey, drab streets of Stretford that inspired their melancholy jangle. Thanks to Maggie Thatcher, jobs are scarce and gender roles boringly traditional. The Moors Murders cast a ghostly pall over the city, as later found in The Smiths ‘ eerie song ‘Suffer The Little Children’.

My one and only quibble is that there are only brief flickers of Moz’s wit, but in general the film has an accurate sense of time and place, and the performances are excellent across the board. The artist has a fully -formed presence – he just hasn’t earned it yet, baby.