The boy with a chip on his shoulder
England Is Mine (15) Verdict: Dour biopic ★★★✩✩ Williams (15) Verdict: Turbo-charged ★★★★✩ HEAVEN knows, if you’re not miserable when you go in to see England Is Mine, the film about the singer-songwriter Morrissey before he was famous, sitting in his bedroom under posters of Oscar Wilde broodingly entertaining thoughts of suicide, you’ll be miserable when you come out.
Mark Gill’s debut feature attempts to do for the future frontman of The Smiths what Sam Taylor-Johnson, as she is now, so stirringly did for the young John Lennon in 2009’s Nowhere Boy.
But one difference is that Taylor-Johnson had the blessing of Lennon’s family. Gill’s biopic is unauthorised and it shows: unhelpfully, there are none of Morrissey’s songs.
Still, within those creative constraints, Gill does a decent job of evoking Manchester in the Seventies, and the young Steven Patrick Morrissey’s dead-end life there, with a tax- office career looking infinitely more likely than musical stardom.
Gill’s trump card is a nicely judged lead performance by Jack Lowden — a million miles from his dashing turn as a Spitfire pilot in Dunkirk.
Jessica Brown Findlay is just as far removed from Downton Abbey’s Lady Sybil. She plays Linder, a punkish artist and the only person who shared Steven’s glum conviction that he was more special than most of the people around him.
WILLIAMS tells the story of another singular Englishman, the Formula 1 owner Sir Frank Williams, whose humble background was belied by a life that seemed gilded with good fortune and rich rewards until he was paralysed from the shoulders down in a 1986 road accident. I’ve interviewed Williams and he is charismatic and charming. Morgan Matthews’s absorbing and moving documentary also reveals him as maddeningly self- centred, obsessed with motor-racing to the exclusion of all else — but brilliant nonetheless.