Close! So close!
Having lived and danced through the Northern Soul years in North West England I was excited to watch this movie. The music score is fantastic and does not rely on only floor stompers but also some less known gems.
Two friends bond over northern soul matt and john there is a scene in the film where matt and john get their passports johns passport suggest his year of birth is 1959 that would make him 15 and you see him drinking booze in the pub i mean when i was 18+ i would be asked for i.
Not enough around the music and too much around the fighting and the drugs which made the film largely messy and all over the place tonally.No real character developments or dynamics made the drama also fall flat.
I've often reflected that English film making hasn't done enough to explore the English experience (compared for example to American reflexiveness in film which has been ongoing part of US cinema since the start), so I find films which look at England's cultural and social experiences with a little bit of favorable bias, and find in this film, about a phenomena probably little known outside of the UK something quite welcoming. Northern Soul, for anyone unfamiliar was a dance/party movement based on obscure American soul music which appeared in Manchester (among other places) in the late 1960s and who's preference, unlike the tastes of the capitol, tended towards lesser known soul music, often of a more up-tempo character.
Having been a teenager in the 70's regrettably Northern Soul passed me by, so I have little knowledge of the music and rather stumbled across this movie, I thought this movie was a gem. Here we have the gritty 70's a tough decade but in some ways better than now.
As someone who was around that scene in the 70's, I can say that this movie was so nostalgic and captures perfectly the era, the energy and whole ethos of Northern Soul. I'm just surprised that the director struggled so much to get distribution.
The film is about young boys in a poor British industrial town becoming friends over soul music. They get high on amphetamines and dance and DJ their asses off.
This is a mockumentary following the story of Mark Sherbert. At the start of the film Mark is put out by his wife of 12 months because she has fallen out of love of him.
