Not another film about football hooligans, you may well cry. This one, however, is a little different from movies like the Football Factory, since it is a fictionalised account of the true story of the early life and times of Cass Pennant, who became known as one of the UK's best-selling black authors.
Cass, a Jamaican orphan surprisingly adopted from Barnardo's by an elderly white couple in a Fifties London not exactly devoid of racism, became the feared 6ft 5in leader of the Intercity Firm, a band of violent West Ham supporters.
He got himself imprisoned for his pains at a time when Thatcher was determined to stamp out "the English disease" and was afterwards shot three times by a manic Arsenal fan before finally renouncing his former lifestyle.
He says in Jon Baird's film, in which he is very well portrayed by Nonso Anozie, that he became a football hooligan as a way to earn some sort of respect in the working-class London which was the only home he knew. "they're still cute at that age before they get curly hair and big lips," says a neighbour to Cass's adoptive mum when he's a toddler. He suffers much more than that, though that is all too believable - the rest of his story would seem like pure melodrama if it weren't substantially true.
It was the consistent affection of his parents (Linda Bassett and Peter Wright) and the love of his white wife Elaine (Natalie Press), added to his own natural intelligence, that made him change rather than his spell in jail, where a fellow black prisoner, Zulu (Winston Ellis), accuses him of being white under the skin and a racist warder destroys his first attempt at an autobiography. The point of Cass is a simple one. It's that you can redeem yourself, with the caveat that you have to be fairly tough-minded to do so. David Cameron would be delighted with the moral, but there are times where it's straightforward to the point of becoming naïve.
Writer-director Baird tells this remarkable story without much of the flair shown by Alan Clarke in the brilliant the Firm. But where Baird does score is in marshalling his actors, which he does with considerable skill - and they repay him with first-rate performances. those who saw Anozie's Lear and othello on the stage will know what a subtle actor he is, and those who remember Press in My summer of Love will not be surprised that she invests the smaller part of Elaine with exactly the right tone of chirpy, determined good sense. And of course Bassett has seldom given a bad performance, and nor has Wright. These four could hardly be better and they are aided by Daniel Kaluuya and Verelle Roberts as the young Cass, Jayson Wheatley, Rory Jennings, Gavin Brocker and Leo Gregory as his friends, by tamer Hassan as the club owner for whom he becomes a bouncer and Bronson Webb as the manic villain of the piece. There isn't, in fact, a single off-key performance in what is otherwise an ordinary film that is intent on bringing back memories of the bad old days when families had to be careful where they stood in the football stands for fear of racist chants and rioting.
Whether we are any better now that knives are the obligatory aids of neighbourhood gangs is a moot point.
Cass
Cert: 18
