The Damned United

Rating

: * * * *

Verdict

:

Portrait of a narcissist.

You don't need to know who Brian Clough was to enjoy this engaging and hugely entertaining dramatisation - but if you do, your opinion about it may be more heated than mine.

Clough, who died in 2004, is widely regarded as the greatest English football manager (read: coach) never to manage the national side. As brilliant as he was conceited - he famously said "I wouldn't say I was the best manager in the business; but I was in the top one" - he steered Nottingham Forest to back-to-back European cup wins.

But he was equally famous for an earlier spell of only 44 days as manager of Leeds United. His move to the club surprised many, since Clough had made no secret of his contempt for its players and the departing manager, Don Revie, accusing them of thuggery and cheating. Six weeks later, having won only one of six games, Clough was sacked.

The film is based on David Peace's 2005 fact-based novel

The Damned Utd

, which recounts in diary form each of those 44 days as a stream-of-consciousness in Clough's head. Scripted by Peter Morgan (

The Queen

) and with Sheen, the man who played Tony Blair in that film taking the main role, it will doubtless divide those who consider Clough either a wronged genius or an arrogant fool.

On the strength of this version, he's a bit of both. The film, which skips back and forth in time to relate his pre-Leeds career in parallel with his short stay at the club, shows him as both mercurial and insufferable.

This was an era of tight pants and tighter budgets ("A salary of £300 a week? You can't pay a footballer that!" Derby's chairman Sam Longson, splendidly played by Jim Broadbent, splutters at one point) when players had a half-time cigarette and famous club managers were forbidden by their wives from taking calls at dinner time.

Director Hooper, making his big-screen debut, cannily blends archive and artificially degraded new footage and his sparing use of on-field action (he deploys crowd sound in deserted stadiums to good effect) maintains verisimilitude.

Through it all, Sheen's Clough struts with a cocksure truculence that makes him as hard to know as a character as he probably was as a man. But what lifts the film into something quite special is the relationship between Clough and Peter Taylor (Spall, as generous and warm as he's ever been), his loyal lieutenant and talent scout. Their partnership would later end badly, but this film tells it as a sort of love story - and it's better for that.

Peter Calder

Cast

: Michael Sheen, Timothy Spall, Jim Broadbent, Colm Meaney

Director

: Tom Hooper

Running time

: 97 mins

Rating

: M (contains offensive language)