take a chance: watching the world through young Morrissey’s lens in England is Mine
If Elio in Call Me By Your Name is the exact voice of a lovelorn me, the young Morrissey in England Is Mine is my ultimate weakness.
(The very type of guy my mother warned me about, basically.)
England is Mine chronicles the (fictional) life of young Steven Patrick Morrissey, in the early days before fronting the Smiths and rising to become a British icon for indie rock and one of the world’s noted and most scrutinized lyricists. This review, in its entirety and personal honesty, will focus on the film and film alone, post-1980s Morrissey excluded. It ends where the film ends.
Pre-fame Morrissey is a shy, introverted teenager who’s a shell unto himself. A t-shirt wearing, wavy haired poet who hides behind his rimmed glasses and writes words of the world into his notebook. A well-read loner who retreats into his solitude inside his bedroom and listens to the New York Dolls while practicing his bows to the unseen crowd in his imagination. He skulks the Manchester music scene in his duffle coat, listening to the small bands and Sex Pistols, orders beers and refuses to talk to those he deems of no interest.
He exists. He’s there. Scanning the crowded bar floors, tangled thoughts and big dreams too far ahead of himself, oldies playing on the vinyl in his mind.
“There’s no job that’s suitable,” says he, to his father’s obvious disapproval, a picky aspect to his character and the false sense of entitlement he chooses to adapt all too easily, up until reality comes a’calling and he is forced to take a dreary office job at a place where his boss barks, “Why can’t you be like everyone else?”
“Stop sulking,” chides his best friend, Anji Hardie, and is immediately met by Steven’s “I’m not sulking.”
“Then what are you doing?” she asks. Steven falls silent, and admits, after a moment, “Sulking.”
He sits at his typewriter, whiles away the days filling the pages with the thoughts crammed in his head and sentences of fancy words judged too ‘posh’ for the people around him. He bangs his head at the typewriter and struggles to write in the way me, a part-time writer watching herself from the outside, can only understand too well.
Jack Lowden, in a dramatically different role from Dunkirk and A United Kingdom that truly showcases his intricate acting and places him (justifiably) as the leading man of the film, plays Morrissey with subtle sincerity, a layered performance that lets you in to the young Steven’s maze of a mind, a refreshing candor, a frankness that allows you to empathize and sign yourself up for the ups and downs of the journey with him. There’s those minute gestures, the details he infused into Steven’s tics that I absolutely love, like his quick glance at and away from Linder the first time they talk in a park, his nose nuzzling and cheek caressing the phone in longing while talking to her when she’s down in London and he’s still stuck up in Manchester, and his left hand holding onto his teal shirt’s sleeve during the Nosebleeds’ first gig.
Jessica Brown Findlay is no less excellent as Steven’s outspoken, firm companion and poetry-quoting partner, Linder. Findlay and her decisive, sharp turn as the punk rock artist bring a playful dynamic to the duo’s conversations and reveal to us, as third person observers, a glimpse of what Steven is, who he is trying to be, and who he could be.
The camera sweeps over the typewriter, the music scenes, and the vinyl spinning on the turntable. The motifs of water—the rain, the puddles on the ground, the glass at the sink spilling with unfiltered tap water—with the colours of the shots at the windows, raindrops and late, late, yellowish orange glow of a bedroom are gorgeous.
Then there is the music. Those soft oldies playing over the club dancing scenes and on the vinyl as Steven’s in his bedroom got to me. I adore the scenes and couldn’t help laughing, sniggering, and chuckling with the script.
The fictional Steven the film paints is, initially, the boy who would rather contemplate the world from his bedroom window. The poet who retreats from the world and hesitates to reach out to those he judges beforehand, those he deems would not understand him, the one too artsy and engrossed in, and too stubborn a believer of, his own religion, of his own faith, to believe in somebody else’s. Steven is the boy who would rather sit with, and perfectly complements, the girl who addresses his boredom with her, “And here I was going to shoot you,” than the flighty, talkative office colleague whose “Can I help you with anything,” prompts him to ask, “Do you have any bullets?”
Steven is the determined, self-proclaimed genius who states, “My alphabet only has one letter,” but falls to pieces when his sure-fire plan disintegrates before his eyes. His drastic change in appearance after his guitarist Billy gets the record deal instead of him is all too relatable to me, a last resort act of someone grasping for control, for any sense of control in a life he sees breaking apart in front of, and all around, him.
Gone are the waves clouding around his glasses and shaping those round cheeks. In place is a short, no nonsense hairdo on its way to the gelled Morrissey ‘do of fame.
“I don’t know how to carry on,” he cries to his mother, wrings his hand, to which she, clutching his Oscar Wilde hardback, asks, “Who are you? Are you the boy who stood up on the table and sang to me, or are you just like everyone else? Do you remember why I bought you all this? The books, the typewriter?”
To which he replies, “This world isn’t for people like me.”
And she says, “Then create your own world,” echoing Linder’s earlier coaxing of Steven to, “Do something,” to write, to sing, to create, for the world to remember him by.
I’m not going to lie that the film doesn’t leave me hanging right at the end, just before Steven, on the eve of becoming Morrissey, opens that door at Johnny Marr’s house. It’s a perfect little indie film by itself, no faults. The music’s lovely, the performances commendable all around, and the cinematography a thing of melancholic, nostalgic beauty for days gone by and long lost coloured lights. I left the theatre, head spinning, reeling and brimming with the Lowden-as-Steven’s voiceover pouring over his life philosophy, missing intensely that young Steven who’d one day become Morrissey. The young, volatile, bookish and quirky geek who asks, point-blank, “Why is everyone concerned with my happiness?”, and who only reveals to his closest and dearest his real stance on happiness. One who’s as dreamy as he’s kept to himself—the kind of artistic soul I am attracted to and fall in love with too easily, out of seeing a reflection of myself, the kind my mother once cautioned me to stay clear off, for fear of the uncertainties and liberties that accompany artistic freedom ( “Where’s the security of a long-lasting relationship in that?”). The Steven portrayed with a flawless finish by Lowden in the film.
The Steven who undergoes a journey through the course of the film, the Steven who is transformed, the Steven who becomes. The Steven who’s stayed with me. The Steven who lingers. The Steven who finally, at long last, dares.