Skintown review – Northern Irish scamps rave their Troubles away

Derry Girls meets Human Traffic in this spirited, larky and at times poignant period piece about raving and drug dealing scamps in Northern Ireland in the 1990s. It doesn’t go quite so far as to suggest that the social revolution that MDMA engendered in youth culture and spread to the rest of the UK in that decade played a causal role in the Northern Irish peace process – the way some people suggest ecstasy put a stop to football hooliganism, for example. But it does note the coincidence of the timing.

The centrepiece of the film is a club night and beachside afterparty at which Carl Cox DJs and “Catholics and Protestants come together and dance, all juiced up on vitamin E” – on the same day in August 1994 that the IRA announces an end to hostilities. At the afterparty, our heroes from the Catholic side of Enniskillen – “Skintown” to the locals – get loved-up and giggly with a British squaddie, and all their troubles, ie the Troubles, seem to melt away. “I love Brits,” one says with a spliff in his mouth. “I love the IRA. I love the RUC … If you love them, you defuse them, they have no reason to fight you.”

The film, and the historical record, both note that there was a comedown after the highs of that night, and that the 1994 ceasefire was provisional. But Skintown is able to maintain a mood of defiant apoliticism, and forcefully states the rights of young people to ignore their forefathers’ enmities and to write fresh pages in the stories of their lives.

It is for reasons of wanting a fresh start that our somewhat depressed and traumatised, indie-loving protagonist Vinny (Jack Rowan) has an escape fund in a biscuit tin under his bed. It’s also why he and Jonty (The Young Offenders’ Chris Walley), his ravey best mate and co-worker of an evening at Tony Pepperoni’s Pizzeria, agree to take a bag of 400 pills that were stolen from the Ulster Volunteer Force and daringly, or foolhardily, flog them in a club under the noses of the very same paramilitary thugs.

Adapting his own 2018 novel about these escapades, Ciarán McMenamin has ported too many chunks into the voiceover, giving the film a bit of a telling-not-showing problem. But there are also lots of vivid specifics, such as the cheekily sacrilegious way Jonty says “body of Christ” as he places an ecstasy tablet into each of a row of outstretched hands. And in one of those details a writer probably wouldn’t think up if they hadn’t grown up with sectarian violence in the background, there is a topless raver really going for it in a wheelchair. He was paralysed from the waist down by an IRA bullet – but he’s there dancing in the club every week, so the dealers stash their pills in his chair and call it “deals on wheels”.

The club in question, Kellys in Portrush, County Antrim, really was a utopian haven for wide-eyed dancers at the time and Cox really did play there in 1994 (albeit probably not on the night of the ceasefire, which was a Wednesday). The soundtrack is spot on, featuring aural madeleines by the Prodigy, Josh Wink, Jaydee and, in one glorious peak moment, some choral Debussy. So while viewers who were there and really lived it in the 90s might cavil about minor lapses in authenticity here and there, it’s more likely viewers are going to savour the rush of youthful hedonism the film has to offer – and willingly succumb to its free-spirited impulses.