Beats doesn't quite capture the rhythm

It’s more than twenty years since Trainspotting (1996) changed the face of Scottish cinema. It told us a new type of narrative, said something fresh about us as a country, and – more important – it introduced us to a whole new generation of talent.

Trainspotting gave us Ewan McGregor, Robert Carlyle, Kelly Macdonald. Kevin McKidd, Ewen Bremner, Jonny Lee Miller and Peter Mullan. All of whom have gone on to stellar careers and international recognition.

It would be easy to bracket Beats with Trainspotting since they both feature elements of youth culture rebellion but that would be lazy and wrong. Beats remains fundamentally flawed and isn’t as good as Danny Boyle’s film. It does however have, at least in parts, the same ferocious energy and, most important, it provides a major calling card for another generation of Scottish talent.

There are a lot of actors making their film debuts in this Brian Welsh adaptation of a Kieran Hurley and some of them, I suspect, are going to be around for a long time.

Set in West Lothian in 1994 it’s the story of the last stand of rave culture in the face of authoritarian repression. Our heroes are two young boys caught up in the middle of the conflict. Johnno (Cristian Ortega) is the good kid whose future stepdad is a policeman and whose family are moving up in the world; Spanner (Lorn Macdonald) is the youngest member of a local criminal family. He is trapped in the scheme with his brother Fido (Neil Leiper), a character so psychotic he would make Begbie think twice before tackling him.

They are desperate to be included in the seductive world of rave culture, enticed by the D-Man (Ross Mann) an illegal pirate broadcaster who holds out the promise of the rave to end them all. Johnno and Spanner will do anything to go but it is a night that will be the making of them.

As they head for the secret venue they are being pursued by the police, including Johnno’s ‘stepdad’, and Fido from whom Spanner has stolen a large amount of cash. This night should not end well.

This is the point where Beats ran out of steam for me. The first two acts are terrifically energetic and build up a huge amount of drama. Spanner, for example, is heroically tragic. You do not want a man like Fido on your tail and I genuinely feared for him. However once they get to the rave all the tension dissipates.

Johnno and Spanner drop a couple of ecstasy tablets, the monochrome film turns to clichéd trippy psychedelic colour, and that’s really about it. None of the big stories is really resolved, on screen at least; the end credits tell us what happened to the characters but we never get to see it.

Welsh, who co-wrote with Hurley as well as directed, never really delivers a final act that lives up to the rest of the film. The tension dissipates like a deflated balloon and narratively it is very unsatisfying.

The performances however are first class. Ortega and Macdonald are marvellous, there is an obvious bond between them. It is made perfectly clear why this odd couple are together. Neil Lieper is also excellent as the mercurial but terrifying Fido, and Laura Fraser, who once upon a time was a bright young talent herself, anchors the film solidly as the only grown-up in the room.

I mentioned comparisons between this film and Trainspotting but to be honest I think its influences are solidly in the British New Wave. There are echoes here of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960), or the Beatles films of Richard Lester. The black and white palette only increases the impact of those antecedents.

I doubt this film will achieve classic status but there is still much to enjoy in Beats, even if it doesn’t quite stick the landing.

Tolkien...bored, with a ring

One of the lessons I learned in many years as a celebrity interviewer is that appearances are deceptive; star power was often inversely proportional to any levels of interest and engagement.

Harrison Ford, for example, frequently displayed the persona of a grumpy carpenter and was often as interesting, whereas the ineffably modest Richard Farnsworth – look him up – turned out to have been a cowboy who was pals with Wyatt Earp. Who knew?

My point is that people who do memorable things are not necessarily memorable in and of themselves and that, for me, is the big issue with Tolkien. J.R.R. Tolkien may have written some remarkable books in his Middle Earth novels but, compared to others of his generation and background, his life was fairly unremarkable.

Certainly looking on with a century’s worth of hindsight the Battle of the Somme would be a terrifying and nightmarish experience for us but the tragic reality is that it was the lived reality of hundreds of thousands of young men of Tolkien’s generation. What separates him is that he was lucky enough to survive, and he went on to write best-selling books.

The film goes to enormous lengths to hammer home the influences from his life that pop up in Lord of the Rings and others. He is plucked from a poor but idyllic rural childhood (The Shire) and then unceremoniously transplanted to the dark satanic mills of Mordor, or Birmingham as they have it here.

He finds a wealthy benefactor who funds his fees at a good school where he falls in with three other like-minded young men. It’s almost like a fellowship, or something like that. The formative experience of his life however is the Somme, and the film is largely told in flashback as he wanders through the trenches in a fever dream spotting ringwraiths, and Sauron and all manner of narrative Elvish breadcrumbs.

It’s all a bit predictable but entirely necessary because at heart Tolkien was a philologist, someone who studied the origins and structures of language. There is a lot of philology in this film which is even less dramatic than it sounds, hence the need for those Middle Earth allusions.

Tolkien is earnest and good-hearted which is how you might also describe the performance of Nicholas Hoult in the title role. Lily Collins is a little vapid in a lightly written role as the love of his life, and no one else in the film is really allowed to have much of an internal life. Perhaps it’s their own fault for not having written door-stopping fantasy novels too.

Finnish director Dome Karukoski handles the material as deftly as anyone might but the real stars are Lasse Frank Johannessen’s lush cinematography and Harri Ylonen’s deft editing which keep the story visually interesting.

Tolkien isn’t necessarily a bad film, neither is it an especially good one. It’s just a workmanlike effort at a tale which didn’t really need to be told.