The Damned United

Brian Clough's reign at Leeds United makes for energetic drama, writes MICHAEL DWYER

THE JUSTIFIED Ancients of Mu Mu, the alter ego of money-burning duo KLF, reached the UK top 10 in 1991 with It's Grim Up North.

Apart from the repeated title, the lyrics formed a recitation of unprepossessing place names such as Burnley, Buxton, Widnes, Wigan, Glossop, Speke – and Leeds.

The single was issued in a grey sleeve. The music video was in black-and-white and performed in pouring rain. It ended, as Jerusalem soared in the background, with the caption, “The north will rise again.”

And so it has this month, in the coincidental arrival of screen treatments of books by David Peace. First there was the stylish, often disturbing Channel 4 series based on his Red Ridingquartet, graphically depicting Yorkshire in the 1970s and early 1980s as a haven of political corruption and police brutality.

Although the grimness of life up north is not skirted in the movie of Peace's The Damned United, it seems idyllic by comparison. The setting is 1974, during an era of power cuts, naff fashions and horrible haircuts, when conditions were primitive even for star footballers in that pre-Premiership period, and so long ago that Leeds United was the dominant force in the beautiful game.

As the film begins, the club has lost the most successful manager in its history, Don Revie (played with gravitas and gruffness by Colm Meaney), who has taken charge of the England squad. His successor is Brian Clough (Michael Sheen), the cocky, flamboyant manager who guided struggling Derby County from the relegation zone of the second division – and who harbours a festering grudge against Revie.

In taking the new job, Clough dispenses with his closest ally – his Derby deputy Peter Taylor (Timothy Spall). On his first day at the Leeds grounds, Clough, already unpopular with the players, doesn’t make life any easier for himself when, with typical candour, he tells the team that all their medals were based on cheating. He clashes with the captain, Billy Bremner (Stephen Graham) and bluntly addresses Johnny Giles (Peter McDonald) as, “You, Irishman.”

The movie charts the escalating drama of Clough’s turbulent tenure at Leeds, which ended after just 44 days, and the shaping of his personality and passion for his job through flashbacks to the 1960s. It closely observes his career as one balanced on a precarious seesaw of extreme highs and lows of success and failure, and driven by Clough’s unstinting self-belief and ambition.

The attraction of this story to writer Peter Morgan is obvious, given his preoccupation with exploring the mindsets of power figures in his screenplays for Frost/Nixon, The Queen, The Dealand The Last King of Scotland. Morgan found a particularly suitable case for dramatic treatment in the larger-than-life figure of Clough, in his arrogance, impetuosity and lust for glory, and in the severance of his relationship with Taylor, which is shown to take the form of a platonic love affair.

Morgan reduces the Leeds players and on-pitch action to the periphery of the picture and elides the darker, drink-fuelled side of Clough delineated in Peace's book. Clough emerges as a conflicted figure blending charm and wit with hubris in the terrific central performance by the chameleonic Sheen, who portrayed David Frost in Frost/Nixon, Tony Blair in The Queenand The Deal, and Kenneth Williams in Fantabulosa!

Moving from television, where he directed the awards-laden John Adams and the Morgan-scripted Longford, Tom Hooper makes a sprightly cinema debut with The Damned United. He nimbly advances its progress over the duration of a football game, investing it with energy, spirit, tension and entertainment value.