This Is England

This Is England is a 2006 British drama film written and directed by Shane Meadows. The story centres on young skinheads in England in 1983. The film illustrates that skinhead subculture, whose 1960s roots include elements of black culture especially ska, soul, and reggae music, became adopted by white nationalists, which led to divisions within the skinhead scene.

The movie is taut, tense, relentless. It shows why Shaun feels he needs to belong to a gang, what he gets out of it and how it goes wrong. Without saying so, it also explains why skinheads are skinheads: Any threatened group has a tendency to require its members to adopt various costumes, hair or presentation styles that mark them as members, so they can't deny it or escape it, and the group can exercise authority even at a distance.

What happens at the end is part of history: Skinheads became allied with the neo-Nazi National Front. They became violent toward nonwhites and immigrants. It wasn't so much that they hated them, perhaps, as that they needed an enemy to validate themselves, because they felt as worthless as they said their opponents were. Whenever you see one group demonizing another group, what they charge the others with is often what they fear about themselves. For Shaun, this is more than he was looking for. Better to be lonely than to be deprived of the right to be alone. [Roger Ebert]