Submarine

I don't know about you, but I grew up on a diet of movies involving American teens, whose lives bore no relation to my own. Much as The Breakfast Club and Ferris Bueller's Day Off are seminal teen movies, as Morrissey once warbled, they say nothing to me about my life. I never had an adventure of any kind in detention, and I didn't know anyone whose dad owned a Ferrari. This, then, is the antidote to all that.

Directed by Richard Ayoade, of IT Crowd and much other stuff fame, this is a tale of a teenage boy who's too smart for his own good, growing up in a small town that he clearly feels is beneath him. In this case it's Swansea, but it could be any provincial British town. The boy's name is Oliver Tate, and he's just the kind of amusingly unsufferable prick that I'm sure we all were at his age. And he is about to go through something of a minefield of his life, which includes bullying at school, getting his first girlfriend, his parents going through a sticky patch, his mother taking up with a new age hippy type who's just moved in next door, and so forth.

All of this he navigates, narrating his life as if it were a movie, trying and often failing to do the right thing, and get through it all unscathed and mentally intact.

So far, so Adrian Mole. And in many ways, it's got quite a bit of the Secret Diary Of Adrian Mole about it. Where we part from it, however, is in that it's cruelly funny, with excellent dialogue, and a genuinely hilarious central performance from Craig Roberts (who you may have seen recently in Being Human); it's also a very well judged performance. Oliver Tate is, to put it mildly, a bit of a tit. As he's portrayed, he's amusingly so, with a lot of pathos about him. Any more of a tit, and you'd probably lose patience with him; any less, he wouldn't be funny. Hence, between the director and the actor, they've captured something pretty special, which is a portrayal of a teenager which seems true to life, and yet is still endearing.

It's a highly enjoyable film, and if you're in your mid to late thirties, and grew up thinking that you lived among social and intellectual inferiors, in a small town you couldn't wait to get out of, then you'll also find it hugely nostalgic.