Very much a post-Winter of Our Discontent document, this chronicle of pissed-off rocker Hazel O'Connor blazing through the early '80s London music scene gets neutered less by the Thatcherite counter-revolution already gearing up in the horizon than by the plot's worn narrative arc. Teaming up with young manager Phil Daniels, O'Connor and her gutty band Breaking Glass (including junkie sax player Jonathan Pryce) trudge in skinhead pubs, get shafted by promoters and shaken down by the police until a lighter-fueled performance improvised through a blackout catches the eye of the big-time fellas. From then on, lovelorn Daniels can only watch helplessly as O'Connor treads down the sellout road, her edges rounded off by success. Director Brian Gibson, later on to helm another rebellion-through-music saga with What's Love Got to Do With It, mounts O'Connor's spiky performances but, though locating the social disturbances at the roots of punk, scarcely gets to the movement's transgressive thrust the way portions of Derek Jarman's Jubilee or that same year's far less glam Rude Boy do. Messy and compromised as it is, the picture's grungy unrest still is wholly preferable to the cozily revered old Britannia of Chariots of Fire. With Jon Finch, Peter-Hugo Daly, Gary Tibbs, and Mark Wingett.
--- Fernando F. Croce
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