Marching Powder – Film Review
by Brian Merriman

Written and directed by Director Nick Love
Starring Stephanie Leonidas, Danny Dyer, Calum MacNab, Geoff Bell,
Music by Alfie Godfrey

Danny Dyer, the quintessential interpreter of inner London life, returns to his familiar patch in Marching Powder. It’s a movie visiting in the genres of ‘Trainspotting’, ‘Green Street Hooligans, ‘Blue Story’ etc which exposes the reality of living with drugs, sex, addiction and violence. His time in Eastenders gives him much to call upon in his latest trip into this graphic British sub-culture.

The main thing that is new in this contemporary story by Nick Love, is that this group of football hooligans haven’t ever grown up. Dyer plays Jack, a 45-year-old, husband and father (a lovely role from Dyer’s real-life young son Arty) who has never grown up or had to, thanks to the grudging benevolences of his wealthy father-in-law.

Addicted to porn, drink, drugs and violence, he meanders through working-class sporting and social areas, hunting out rival gangs of football supporters to wipe them out. There is a lot of violence, blood and blades and of course, the fuel is the marching powder almost freely available. Then, the State intervenes and Jack faces the reckoning challenge of shaping up or being shut up…for five years.

Middle-aged Dyer is not alone. He has grown older in a group of equally errant contemporaries (Stanley Browne and Dean Harrison) who seem to meet equally aged rival gangs and conduct themselves in a violent manner, often depicted by gangs of disenfranchised and detached youth in other similar stories.

Jones is married to an ever-patient and attractive Dani (a striking Stephanie Leonidas) a could-be art student, whose laissez-faire lifestyle brought them together and has sustained them over the decades. Affluent bad boy made good, his father-in-law Ron (a menacing Geoff Bell) is holding them together financially, as a result of his earlier failure in connecting with schizophrenic bad boy son Kenny (a chaotic Calum MacNab). Ron would be equally happy if Jack’s bad ways were his downfall. He threatens and goads him throughout.

It’s an interesting twist to see these ageing ‘lost boys’ of London, who have never grown up, but otherwise the plot doesn’t really add anything new to the stories that have filtered out on page, stage and screen over the decades, which also explore and reveal major class and social divides like those that first emerged with Teddy Boys and overflowed in Thatcher’s England.

Clearly, when you don’t have to earn a living, Jack has to find something to occupy his time which drives his treadmill of self sex, drugs and violence to sustain his emotionally empty days.

Nick Love directs his own screenplay, ably supported by a great soundtrack under Alfie Godfrey’s stewardship. The plot moves well, the direction is swift and smooth and the playing strong. But there’s nothing really new in this story and it’s Dyer’s huge presence along with Leonidas’s love interest that keeps us engaged throughout the 97 minutes.