The doyen of Britain's social realists, Ken Loach is not noted as a maker of comedies.
But from Brian Glover channelling Bobby Charlton in the soccer game in Kes, to builder's labourer Ricky Tomlinson getting caught taking a bath in a show home in Riff-Raff, Loach has always managed to punctuate his intimate dramas of desperate lives with scenes of rib-aching humour.
His newest film has as many laughs as any of the previous two dozen though the first hour has some scenes of pretty grim violence. too. Its target is Robbie (Brannigan), who's trying to go straight after a young life of petty crime, because he's about to become a father, a prospect regarded none too favourably by his girlfriend's thuggish uncles.
Tellingly, Loach doesn't sentimentalise his hero - in one of the film's early, gruelling scenes, he (and we) come face to face with one of the victims of his drink-and-drug-fuelled rages - but we are allowed to see that there is both a good man and a frightened boy underneath the street-hardened exterior.
On his community service programme, Robbie comes under the wing of the supervisor (the rough-hewn Henshaw lends the Loach archetype of the decent social service worker a compelling individuality), who takes him and his mates on a distillery visit as an incentive to behave themselves.
