The Football Factory

Like many young men of his ilk, Tommy Johnson (Dyer) lives for leisure: 'Casual sex, watered-down lager, heavily cut drugs - and occasionally kicking the fuck out of someone.' Football fighting: it's the purest rush, a ritual and rallying cause, a source of self-expression, even a reason to live. Tommy's got enough grey matter intact to know his fellow Chelsea Headhunters aren't to a man the acme of self-possession. Take bitter braggart Billy Bright (Harper) or coked-up delinquent Zeberdee (Manookian). Tommy can see the dismay at their bigotry and violence in the eyes of his war veteran grandad Bill (Sutton). By the time Millwall come round in the Cup, this dream fixture is bleeding into Tommy's nightmares. A deft adaptation of John King's candid novel, Nick Love's second rampage through the terraced terrain of South London male growing pains (after Goodbye Charlie Bright) is a similarly larky, sparky romp, though its unblinking, even amused take on disenfranchised male nihilism may dismay those representatives for whom shit-kicking tribal warfare should be marked down as a social vice.