REVIEWED - 16 YEARS OF ALCOHOL: 'Sometimes, for some people, things don't work out as they might have hoped," reflects the narrator and central character, Frankie Mac, at the outset of 16 Years of Alcohol, writes Michael Dwyer.
This semi-autobiographical story stands as an impressive feature film début for its writer-director, Richard Jobson, whose life has worked out better than he might have hoped as a street fighting boy in 1970s Edinburgh.
It's the latest venture for the multi-talented Scotsman, who first made his mark as lead singer with post-punk band The Skids, and later as a poet, a model, a film critic and presenter on the Sky TV series, Movietalk and Face to Face, before making his own movies. Based on his 1987 novel of the same name, 16 Years of Alcohol relates another feasible outcome to his life story, as charted through the highs and lows of Frankie Mac (Kevin McKidd) over three turbulent decades.
The movie opens ominously as Frankie Mac's past catches up with him and his former gang members trap him in an alleyway, brutally beating him to the ground, before the film takes on the form of an extended flashback. He experiences the first of many disillusionments in childhood when he realises that the hard-drinking father he adores is an adulterous liar, and the teenage Frankie Mac inherits his father's propensity for booze, unleashing his simmering violence in brutal gang battles.
With adulthood comes a rocky road to possible redemption as Frankie Mac struggles to shake off the shackles of a past scarred by violence and drinking. Jobson's strikingly textured picture adeptly shifts moods as frequently as its protagonist. The result is gritty, heartfelt and lyrical, although the copious narration proves intrusive and feels superfluous at times, the images speaking more than eloquently to the viewer.
Stylishly shot on High Definition, and achieved on a modest budget, Jobson's film is charged by a freshness and honesty that transcends the familiarity of the Scottish "hard man" movie, and by a fluid, imaginative visual style that's all too rare in contemporary British cinema.
Alternately brash, droll and vulnerable, McKidd is terrific as the complex central character, and there are endearing performances from Laura Fraser and Susan Lynch as the young women who hold out the prospects of alternative lifestyles for his troubled, fatalistic personality.
The aptly eclectic soundtrack ranges from Paddy Reilly (The Fields of Athenry) and Jim Reeves to Velvet Underground and Iggy Pop to Roxy Music, the Blue Nile, and of course, The Skids.
