COMING-OF-AGE DRAMA IS SOMETHING TO RAVE ABOUT
PLENTY of government legislation can be made to look stupid by analysing the small print decades later, but the 1994 Criminal Justice and Public Order Act didn’t stand up to scrutiny even at the time.
It tried to crack down on so-called rave culture by outlawing gatherings at which the music was ‘wholly or partly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats’.
This hugely energetic, visually arresting film — a kind of Scottish version of Jonah Hill’s recent Mid90s — looks back in a certain amount of anger. But it is great fun, too, despite every chance of catching a Clydeside stevedore blushing at some of the fruity language.
Adapted from a play by Kieran Hurley, and co-written by him and director Brian Welsh, Beats is set in a town near Glasgow in 1994.
Johnno (Christian Ortega) is a rather diffident teenage boy whose family — his mother, brother, and mother’s boyfriend, a policeman — are about to move to a nicer neighbourhood.
But Johnno doesn’t want to be dislocated, and especially doesn’t want to be separated from his more outgoing best mate Spanner (Lorn Macdonald). Johnno’s mother
(Laura Fraser) and her partner Robthink ert (Brian Ferguson) think Spanner is a bad lot. He certainly has a chalwhere lenging life at home, where his older, drug-dealing brother Fido (Neil Leiper) subjects him to constant physical abuse. However, Johnno can
see the good in Spanner, and together, having fallen in with Spanner’s older, female cousin and her mates, they hatch a plan to attend a forthcoming rave — ‘junction 6 off the M8’ — while the police (including Robert) make plans to raid it.
Cleverly, Welsh films in black and white, except when the boys take Ecstasy tablets.
There are those who might see his film as an endorsement of bad behaviour. But actually, within the framework of a coming-of-age story, it’s a funny, troubling, enlightening, engaging study of a whole sub-culture, which inevitably will draw comparisons with Danny Boyle’s 1996 film Trainspotting. They deserve to be favourable.
BREAKTHROUGH also focuses on a teenage boy, but could hardly be more different. In telling the purportedly true story of John Smith (Marcel Ruiz, right), who in 2015 fell through the ice on a frozen Missouri lake and survived a 15-minute submersion, it has a transparent agenda.
John’s parents, Joyce (Chrissy Metz) and Brian ( Josh Lucas), adopted him as a baby from Guatemala. Their adored only child, he begins the film as a basketballloving, all-American boy.
Then comes the accident, which logically should kill him, or certainly leave him brain-damaged.
The doctors more or less write him off, yet he makes a complete re c ove r y. J oyce, a devout Christian, believes that the p owe r of prayer brings hi m back from the dead and restores him to full health.
I’m no fan of most faith-based films, and by all accounts there are solid medical reasons to explain John’s recovery, even if it startled doctors at the time.
That said, whether you believe in God or not, it’s hard to watch Breakthrough and not be moved.