Neds

Scottish actor/writer/director Peter Mullan has reportedly said that "Nine out of 10 delinquents are frustrated actors" and he illustrated it well in his third full-length feature, Neds (2010). His first award-winning self-directed screenplay was Orphans (1998), followed by The Magdalene Sisters (a Venice Festival winner in 2002).

The Marxist Glaswegian, a familiar face in independent movies and British TV, won the Best Actor award at Cannes in 1998 for his title role as a recovering alcoholic in Ken Loach's My Name is Joe. He'd also been a supporting actor for Loach's Riff Raff (1991), Danny Boyle's Shallow Grave and Trainspotting, and Mel Gibson's Braveheart. He's co-starred in many other movies (including Mike Figgis's Miss Julie (1999) and Michael Winterbottom's The Claim).

Although his craggy face can express sensitivity well (Boy A), it's best suited to surliness (Young Adam), and he cast himself as the menacing father of his latest film's anti-hero, John McGill, first seen as a plump school swot with promise. In 1974, at secondary school, his family history and genetics, abetted by his environment and peers, he matures into a typical bullying thug, a Non-Educated Delinquent, played with frightening sweet'n'sour realism by thick-set newcomer Conor McCarron.

Mullan's semi-autobiographical docudrama is a damning two-hour portrait of gang-ridden housing estates in Catholic Glasgow districts, where fathers are mean-spirited drunks, mothers are put-upon worn-out nonentities, and sons can only imagine becoming criminals, bouncers or dock workers (or policemen and soldiers). A few escape, as Mullan did (via university).

His Neds are a convincing bunch of non-professional youngsters, set amid the look and feel of the Seventies (from long leather jackets to Kubrick movies, TV's Monty Python to women's perms). All the Scottish supporting cast perform well, notably as no-nonsense schoolteachers and policemen coping with suppressed social unrest.

Towards the end, in an effort to explain his anti-hero's mental conflict, Mullan created a sequence of far-fetched serio-comic fantasies in which the confused, belligerent teenager has a knife fight with a Jesus statue, plans to kill his father, and guides one of his mentally-disabled victims through a pride of lions.

The youngster's angsts are thickly signposted, but his character changes are unconvincing plot developments. During one short summer break, the polite swot becomes a sassy rebel, and then transforms himself into a gang leader, insane anarchist and murderous homeless wretch before going back dutifully to school. Many scenes ring true, compellingly, but the whole movie doesn't.