Star of the show is the 1980s, writes Paul Lynch This is England (Shane Meadows):

Thomas Turgoose, Stephan Graham, Jo Hartley, Andrew Shim, Vicky McClure, Joe Gilgun.

Running time: 100 minutes . . . .

THE year is 1983. Margaret Thatcher is at Number 10 and economic reform is in the air.

Britain is at war in the Falklands.

Back home, the country is beginning to splinter. If you are a boy of 12, like Shaun (played by Thomas Turgoose) in Shane Meadows' new film This Is England, there are many crucial, sometimes life-changing decisions you will have to make:

should you watch Blockbusters after school? Do you stop wearing flares when they make you a figure of fun in the schoolyard?

And which wardrobe would best ward off the bullying . . . the mod, the new romantic or the skinhead look? Later, when he is adopted by a gang of kindly, listless skins under the leadership of Woody (Joe Gilgun), Shaun goes to buy a pair of 16-hole Dr Martens boots only to be told they are not available in size four. In a film brimming with delicious contradictions, Shaun will later end up too big for his boots, standing on the edge of a dangerous political abyss he is too young to comprehend.

This is England is a bristling coming-of-age period drama about a boy's drift into the choppy waters of adolescence. He finds himself exposed to the explosive world of skinhead racism during an era of radical change for England's working classes. He must also navigate skirmishes such as his first kiss in a coalshed with a New Romantic called Smell (Rosamund Hanson), while also make sense of his dad's death in the Falklands. Meadows takes us through this territory, set largely in East Midlands council estates, with some very skilful mood changes, switching at will between nostalgia, fond humour and a tension that's ever ready to burst into violence.

Woody leads the gang on a rampage, storming deserted council houses and laying waste to the empty rooms. But then Combo (Stephen Graham) arrives. A volatile skinhead and National Front agitator, he sidelines Woody, takes Shaun under his wing and redirects the gang's frustrations towards Thatcher and England's immigrants. Misspent youth suddenly seems like something a lot more dangerous (at least until one of the gang, paint-spraying a racist slur on the wall of their local Pakistani shop corner, can't figure out how many Fs there are in "off"). Earlier, Combo asks Milky (Andrew Shim), the only black member of the gang, if he considers himself English or Jamaican. And as the film pauses for Milky to consider the correct answer, the soundtrack fills up with the ominous ticking of a background clock . . . a racial time bomb is about to go off.

There is some remarkable acting: Stephen Graham's Combo is played with the intensity of a James Cagney or a Joe Peschi.

His is the kind of incandescent rage that can turn on a pin. While in Thomas Turgoose, Meadows has found a boy of great pluck . . . in one flash he can take a swing at a grown man twice his size and at the same time, look like the vulnerable 12-year-old boy he really is, an orphan of the Falklands war.

But the real star of the show, at least for the first 40 minutes, is the 1980s. From an edited sequence of TV clips, to the slowmotion lingering on youth fashion, Meadows somehow makes it look terribly new all over again: Roland Rat, Knight Rider, BMXs, the skinhead couture of roll-up jeans and Ben Sherman shirts, the girls with the mod fringes and shaved heads. Shaun's mum, played with a kind of bottomless patience by Jo Hartley, has those window-size glasses made famous by Deirdre Barlow, and a colossal perm that looks like it might have been zapped in the enormous newlooking microwave on the worktop.

Like his previous work (A Room For Romeo Brass, Dead Man's Shoes) this is a film about male bonding and bullying, shot through with Meadow's trademark humour. But it also strikes a few false notes, with some moments that would seem more comfortable in Tony Blair's England: angry boys and men expressing their feelings, hugs of reassurance, and the very troubled Combo able to identify his sense of loss. For a film largely about misdirected anger, I'm not so sure that this type of emotional honesty is normal among people whose business is violence. But Meadows has a gift for exposing the inadequacies, the contradictions, and the foolishness of violent men. If the camera never judges them, it's because Thatcher is the one being judged: This Is England is a film about absent fathers . . . how the unwanted Falklands War robbed boys of their dads;

and how Thatcher's right-wing economics took from men oldfashioned skills and traditional identities. It seems only natural, Meadows is telling us, that anger, violence and nationalism seep into the empty cracks.

Shaun's difficult journey is that he has to figure this out for himself.