“No, Kev, that’s it. Look, I don’t wanna be the same as everybody else. That’s why I’m a Mod, see? I mean, you gotta be somebody, ain’t ya, or you might as well jump in the sea and drown.”

‘Quadrophenia’, directed by Franc Roddam in 1979, is a British drama starring Phil Daniels as a young Mod called Jimmy. Jimmy spends his time in London in a menial job earning money to buy drugs and to hang out with his friends. He falls for a girl called Steph, played by Leslie Ash, and, during a Bank Holiday trip to Brighton, seduces her. Whilst in Brighton however, Jimmy becomes embroiled in the fight between the Mods and the Rockers and is arrested. Returning to London, he finds the Steph has gone off with his friend, his parents evict him and he quits his job. He returns to Brighton to relive the adventure of the previous trip, but it quickly sours. It’s a dour films, ultimately becoming preoccupied with the superficiality and transience of fashion.  The differences between the Mods and the Rockers are blurred: the two groups are basically presented as teenagers looking for an identity and finding it through arbitrary adversity. This blurring is played out early in the film when Jimmy gets into an argument with a Rocker, played by Ray Winstone, in a bathroom cubicle next to his only to find the person he is insulting is an old friend. It’s also a very witty film: in one farcical scene Jimmy and his friends are shown ineptly robbing a pharmacy. In the end, this film isn’t about the culture or music that the groups are obsessed with, it’s about the eternal anxieties of youth and the desire to retain it.

Would I recommend it? Yes – at first glance it seems to be about a nostalgic dip into a particular period of British youth culture, but it’s more universal than that. Watch with ‘Rebel Without a Cause’ for an American version of the same kind of story, or maybe ‘Breathless’.