Reviewed by Robert Hull
Stars Nicky Bell, Liam Boyle, Stephen Graham, Oliver Lee, Lee Battle, Sean Ward, Holiday Grainger, Ian Puleston-Davies,
Sacha Parkinson, Michael Ryan, Samantha McCarthy
Written by Kevin Sampson
Certification UK 18
Runtime 105 minutes
Directed by Pat Holden
Right, it’s time to forget about all those woeful, half-baked, cack-handed football movies – Green Street, The Football Factory, Cass, that means you – and embrace the arrival of a film that finally does justice to those who stood on the terraces and fought in the alleys.
Awaydays, based on the acclaimed cult novel by Kevin Sampson, (onboard here as screenwriter) is a rites of passage tale that mixes exhilaration, passion and fear to underline the tribal nature of following a football team, your football team.
This is a movie about being young, and about wanting to belong to something because you understood the need to be part of a greater whole. It comes on strong, like Anton Corbijn’s Control but with added violence, and boasts an atmospheric soundtrack that mines the industrial pop of the late 1970s and early 1980s, when earnest young men in skinny jeans grabbed guitars and keyboards, and learned to work drum machines.
Carty (Nicky Bell) is a bright young thing, into art and music, but despite his talent he is hypnotised by the world of football gangs – chiefly The Pack, a bunch of waifs and strays in which Elvis (Liam Boyle) holds almost mythic status. The irony is that for all his terrace adoration Elvis just wants to be art-school cool.
Carty and Elvis become friends, and it’s a friendship that although deep (verging on love) is self-serving. Carty needs Elvis’ approval to gain access to The Pack, while Elvis wants to breath in the freedom of being an artist, of expression, of debauchery, and of revelling in difference. All the elements he thinks Carty should be embracing. One wants to be tied to the pack, while the other dreams of leaving it behind.
All of this is set against a backdrop of the football violence that threatened to submerge the game itself. It was a time when travelling to away games allowed expressions of maleness – getting into a ruck, getting drunk, getting high, getting away with it. It was also an era when football embraced fashion. Courtesy of the Liverpool team’s European success its fans were introduced to expensive trainers and designer brands, and other team’s tribes soon followed suit.
Both of Awaydays’ leads are charismatic, being suitably chiselled of cheekbone and earnest of brow, but Stephen Graham (as John Godden, the leader of The Pack) is equally compelling. He cuts an almost pitiful figure as the married man and father who urges his young charges into ‘battle’.
As a reflection of what football, and football matches, were like in this period Awaydays is evocative, mesmerising and brutal fare; but it always remains compelling viewing. The times might have been dark and there was always a chill in the air but thrills and danger were always around the next corner.