Kicks

Emerging from the same Liverpool European Capital of Culture scheme that gave us Terence Davies’s ‘Of Time and City’ and the horror film ‘Salvage’ (set on Brookside Close!), director Lindy Heymann’s promising if uneven feature debut is a low-budget drama about two young women (Kerrie Hayes and Nichola Burley) who push their obsession with a footballer (Jamie Doyle) beyond waiting for him at the ground and staring at his swish city apartment. Hayes and Burley (who struts her stuff in ‘StreetDance 3D’) both offer spirited performances, but, if Heymann and writer Leigh Campbell had resisted the hard-to-swallow hysterics and gunplay of the third act, this could have been a more credible exploration of teenage sexual infatuation and celebrity obsession. What’s most alluring, though, on an intimate scale, is how far Heymann tries to tell her story not through talk but through physical observation and music (even if she relies on a lot of Ladytron). And the sensitive cinematography of young Spaniard Edouard Grau, who shot ‘A Single Man’, is a highlight.