Nostalgia, like ecstasy, is a hell of a drug and Kieron J. Walsh’s warm-hearted, hot-headed “Skintown” is buzzing on both. A more polite brother to the “Kneecap” boys and a more cautious cousin to those “Derry Girls” still, the Fermanagh-set friendship comedy sends fizzy, sweetly chemical energy coursing through a rave-romanticizing riff on the coming-of-age formula. The story may not be exactly new, but its bittersweet life lessons are delivered with such retroactive affection and such eagerness by the appealing cast, that if you’re of a mind to complain, well, in the parlance of the movie, would you ever give over, catch yourself on and wise up.
It is 1994, in Enniskillen, unflatteringly dubbed “Skintown” by its denizens and famous for “a lake, an old castle and an IRA bomb that killed 11 civilians in 1987.” Vinny (Jack Rowan) wants nothing more than to get the hell out. Partly, that’s due to the omnipresent dangers of an intractable conflict that has been ongoing since before he was born. (Vinny is 23, though his characterization here skews younger.) But really his disillusion with Skintown is an independence struggle of a more personal kind — one recognisable to anybody who remembers their jaundiced familiarity with their childhood hometown starting to curdle into contempt as adulthood beckoned. When Vinny strikes up an unlikely friendship with Wilson (Hope Ipoku Jr.) a Black squaddie from Manchester who’s been deployed to serve in the universally despised British military patrols, they bond when he realises that for Wilson, joining the army was his escape from the place he grew up in.
Still, as soon as Vinny gets the money together, he’s resolved to leave, although there are things he’ll miss: his supportive, hardworking paramedic mum (Roisin Gallagher); his peppy unrequited crush Eileen (Jamie Lee O’Donnell); and most of all, his best mate Jonty (Chris Walley), a shell-suited, high-spirited raver just out to have a good time. Vinny and Jonty are as thick as the thieves they eventually, inadvertently become when they’re pressganged into a caper involving a load of ecstasy stolen from the UVF (a loyalist paramilitary group).
On the bright side, though — and DP Ruairi O’Brien’s pleasant images make most everything bright even when, among sparse crowds and street scenes that feel rigidly dressed to the camera, the limits of the budget show — if they manage to sell the drugs and survive, they stand to make quite a bit of cash. More, anyway, than they could hope to score from their part-time jobs at the neighborhood pizzeria, whose oleaginous owner, splendidly named Tony Pepperoni (Michael Smiley), insists on serving his pizzas with a side of Peking ribs because, he contends, “the Irish aren’t ready for pizza on its own. They need a wee side of ribs to wean them off the Chinese.”
That kind of authentically eccentric observation feels lifted directly from experience, and the pacy screenplay, adapted by Enniskillen native Ciarán McMenamin from his 2018 novel, abounds in such flourishes. As a ritual, the whole pub greets the TV newsreader (modelled on BBC institution Moira Stuart) like an old friend every time she begins her report with “Good evening.” “Body of Christ,” blasphemes Jonty benignly, handing out pills at a rave like they’re communion wafers. And, it being marching season, everyone is used to maneuvering around the Orangemen who take to parading down the main street at the drop of a bowler hat. “They’d want to get a move on if they’re planning on stopping outside every Catholic pub,” sighs barmaid Chalky (Tara Lynn O’Neill) resignedly.
Ah yes, the Catholics. The Protestants. The Republicans. The Unionists. The IRA, the UVF, the UDA, the INLA, the RUC, the Brits and the Battle of the Boyne — Vinny’s rather unnecessary voiceover namechecks them all, with more or less equal disparagement. While he and his mates are from a Catholic/Republican background, “Skintown” is careful not to overtly assign blame to one side and virtue to the other. Instead, most of its rancor is directed without sectarian bias, at the politician class. The brief, incredulous euphoria that follows the fateful announcement of an IRA ceasefire, is immediately dampened by one barfly (Belfast-born icon Lalor Roddy) observing drily, “If there’s any conceivable way to fuck this up, those politicians will find it.”
This careful avoidance of any alienating perspective, and its streak of sentimentality make “Skintown” a more timid proposition than, say, “Kneecap,” even as it ramps up to an inevitable tragedy to undercut the bursts of MDMA-infused idealism elsewhere. But it also serves up a gently pointed reminder that for all the region was internationally synonymous with terrorism, reprisal and violent death, most of its inhabitants were ordinary people just going about the humdrum business of everyday life. And being Northern Irish, they did it with an indomitable sense of humor. So don’t come to “Skintown” for trenchant political commentary; come for the slangy jokes, the ’90s kitsch and the precise evocation of the love/hate relationship so many of us Irish have with the place that, however begrudgingly, we call home.
