Johnny Harris is the tough, charismatic London actor who made an indelible impression in Paul Andrew Williams’s 2006 crime drama London to Brighton and in successive series of Shane Meadows’s TV version of This Is England. Now he has written, produced and starred in a boxing film, inspired by his experiences as an ABA teenage champion.
It feels like an intensely personal project. Unfakeably, it comes from the heart. And although I was hoping for more in the way of plot progression and development, it is Harris’s powerful commitment and sincerity that carry this watchable picture.
He is Jimmy McCabe, a former boxing star brought low by alcoholism and depression. After his mum dies, Jimmy reaches crisis point and gym veterans Bill (Ray Winstone) and Eddie (Michael Smiley) coach him for one last, redemptive fight. Ian McShane plays, perhaps inevitably, a smiling-yet-sinister kingpin who organises the kind of dodgy unlicensed bout that Jimmy is tempted to take for the money.
There is the smell of real sweat in this film and the blood and tears seem very real, too.
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