A concrete slum behind St Pancras, Somers Town is a bleak address for a teenage love story. Even Ken Loach would blink at the challenge. You couldn’t twin this “gateway to Europe” with a Soviet gulag for love or money. The towerblocks are full of nervous immigrants, the causeways ruled by 12-year-old brats and Camden council has spent 30 years transforming it into a building site.

For an ex-skinhead such as Shane Meadows, Somers Town is the ideal home from home. The director is revered for his rude-boy dramas set on council estates in the East Midlands – most famously, This Is England. So the sheer whimsy of his first London outing is a comic surprise and, at 72 minutes, blissfully short. There are several more important firsts. The film is shot almost entirely in grainy black and white: a loud warning that this is serious British art which you dismiss at your peril. And Somers Town conveniently doubles as the first port of call for every delinquent who has ever done a runner.

Cue our scruffy hero, Tommo (Thomas Turgoose), an overly earnest yob with toxic quantities of northern pluck. Within minutes of cracking open his first (under-the-counter) beer, Tommo is chased down an alley, mugged by the Bash Street Kids and given a swift beating for good measure. This is a routine piece of scene-setting for a Meadows parable, so don’t be alarmed. Unabashed by this small hiccup, Tommo refuses the sensible offer of a train ticket home and hooks up instead with Marek (Piotr Jagiello), a gangling Polish youth who takes artful snapshots of his grim surroundings while Dad “guest-works” on the massive King’s Cross redevelopment next door.

These meagre details conceal the fluffiest of adolescent rivalries. Both spotty boys are smitten with a beautiful French waitress, Maria (Elisa Lasowski), who pinches their cheeks each morning and kisses them goodbye at night. She is the only piece of sexually desirable real estate for cubic miles. The comedy is how the lads are forced to pocket their differences to remain friends.

Meadows’s confidence in a raw cast has never stood him in better stead. Turgoose – now two years older than the compelling punk he played in This is England– is fast becoming the director’s most important muse since Paddy Considine.

The chemistry is electric because we expect the entire film to go horribly wrong at any second. Turgoose has nowhere to go, and Jagiello is emotionally throttled by his alcoholic father. Neither boy can generate enough steam to power a three-reel soap, but it’s not for lack of effort – instead, there is almost a fear on the director’s part of completing the story.

The bizarre result is that Perry Benson comes within an inch of stealing the film as Graham, a porky compilation of Arthur Daley, Uncle Monty, Mike Bassett and Fagin. His basement lockup is full of deckchairs and Terry (sic) Henry football shirts. For all the sly humour, though, Somers Town is a hollow pleasure. It aspires to the new wave of London immigration thrillers by Stephen Frears (Dirty Pretty Things) and Anthony Minghella (Breaking and Entering). But it’s not cruel enough.

12A, 72 minutes

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