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While war raged in the Falklands in 1983, a different sort of war was raging at home in Thatcher's England. Shane Meadows' semi-biographical film focuses on the troubles of a group of Midlands teenagers, growing up in an atmosphere of unentitlement, unemployment, and bigotry. Twelve-year-old Shaun, played by first-time actor Thomas Turgoose, is grieving for his father, killed in the Falklands a year ago. His own private grief is made sharper by the bullying of his classmates - ‘Everyone picks on me’, he bemoans - and it's all to do with his trousers, the unfashionable flares he is compelled to wear for reasons of economy.
Directionless, he is befriended by the warm-hearted Woody (Joe Gilgun), who heads up the local skinhead gang, and drawn into the motley collection of misfits, who one minute are trashing a derelict building because there's nothing better to do, and the next are providing Shaun with his own ‘uniform’ of acceptance, the obligatory Ben Sherman shirt and skinhead haircut of a grown-up gang member. The sense of belonging and the rough love of the gang at first fills the void of loneliness and abandonment experienced by Shaun after his father's death.
But there is a more sinister element abroad in the shape of Combo (Stephen Graham), an older skinhead, recently released from a three-year spell in prison, and burning with rage and a racist agenda. He and his erstwhile ‘mates’ infiltrate Woody's gang and introduce their code of intolerance and hate. Stephen Graham manages to convey a character of violence and uncontrolled anger, but with his vulnerability sewn into him as firmly as the red cross of St George is sewn on to the flags that have become the gang's symbol of pilgrimage and purpose.
He has spent his time in prison thinking about Lol (Vicky McClure), who by now is Woody's girlfriend, but at the age of sixteen spent one ill-judged night