Quadrophenia love dies hard. After July’s ill-fated cast reunion To Be Someone, now follows this humdrum standalone from the sentimental end of British cinema’s poverty row, seeking to capitalise on residual fondness for all things mod. The star is a scooter: a nifty runaround with two dozen rear-view mirrors , it’s a worthy steed for Patrick McNamee’s callow latter-day knight John Parker (geddit?) as he retraces his late dad’s tyre tracks from Burnhamland to Brighton. This journey – and the rite-of-passage it represents – encompasses legends of old Jam gigs, 1980s songs picking up where the first mods left off, and cameos from associate producer Patsy Kensit and Eldorado’s Jesse Birdsall.
Those mirrors prove symbolic of an entirely backward-looking enterprise. A prolific writer-director whose Me, Myself & Di opened back in June, Chris Green is at least on more crowd-pleasing form than he was in 2018’s Strangeways Here We Come, one of the most aggressively off-putting films I’ve ever seen. It’s hard not to feel well disposed to something that opens with Secret Affair’s My World, sets a moped montage to the Style Council’s Speak Like a Child and stops the action dead so everyone can have a mini-mosh to the Chords’ Maybe Tomorrow. Yet the sounds far outstrip the sights. With licensing fees presumably devouring his budget, Green resorts to shooting in cramped kitchens and overcast laybys; and, for a supposedly eye-opening travelogue, the scenery remains thoroughly middle-of-the-road.
The drama, meanwhile, is fairly callow, hamstrung by episodic plot construction and unpersuasive characterisation. There’s a fun cameo from Mani, and it’s a nice touch that the biker gang bearing down on Parker are absolute sweethearts. Yet for most of the ride, we’re stuck with a sappy hero alongside a female character (Sacha Parkinson) who is all too clangingly Girl Written by Man, a tomboy in a Tacchini dropping everything else in her life for the prospect of Paul Weller tickets. (Weller’s title song plays over the perfunctory third-act crisis.) In years to come, this may wind up among some season of Brexit-era films that recognised Britain’s glory days were long distant – but, for now, it seems thin and overstretched, exactly what results when you make a movie from little but nostalgia.
• The Pebble and the Boy is released on 27 August in cinemas.
