The brick-hard forehead of Nick Love’s new geezer comedy lands with an uncompromising crunch on our sensitive nasal bridge. “Have that!” the film appears to say, “you progressive, cinephile, intersectional …” and the next word is probably a particularly brutal noun to which Love is fiercely committed. Marching Powder is broad, it’s unsubtle, and its cheerfully nonjudgemental attitude to drugs has got it a rare 18 certificate – something that offers its own frisson, given the movie’s laidback attitude to underage consumption of adult porn. But this film has got energy and chutzpah and there are one or two laughs. It’s the kind of film Love has been making for 25 years; the type that goes down best with humour – which Love knows how to do. (As for the title, well, it surely originates with Jay McInerney’s 1984 novel of New York high life Bright Lights, Big City, in which Manhattan yuppies consume “Bolivian marching powder” in an era when it was more exclusive and decadent than it is here.)
With lordly presence, Danny Dyer plays Jack, a plump, middle-aged cocaine enthusiast, born within the sound of Bow Bells, who travels with likeminded friends to the grounds of those lower-ranking football clubs which don’t have the Premier League’s spoilsport anti-hooligan measures. There he has boisterous encounters with local supporters to whom he will make tactless references to the relative affluence of London and their hometown. The people of Tranmere, he says in one of many signature voiceovers, “are all on smack or mobility scooters”.
He is still in love with his wife Dani (Stephanie Leonidas) who exasperatedly loves him, but Jack does no work, and is entirely supported by his formidable father-in-law, played by geezer-film veteran Geoff Bell. Then a brush with the law lands Jack with a last-chance probationary period before sentencing, during which his personal habits will be scrutinised to see if a custodial outcome can be avoided. Can he clean his act up?
Dyer’s performance is always watchable and some of his fourth-wall breaks and remarks to camera are entirely outrageous. As for Love, he could be part of the unofficial history of British cinema: while reviewers have been brooding over Shane Meadows, or nodding over Ben Wheatley, or giving Guy Ritchie his due, Love hasn’t been getting his share. Over-the-top it may be, but Love’s film-making has an attacking force that some of the more respectable Brit films are lacking.
