England Is Mine

For the millions of true believers out there, however...the film provides a blissfully melancholy roll call of pleasures.

It’s decently and honestly acted by Jack Lowden, who keeps the film alive, but it somehow winds up being a story about always following your dream and never giving up.

The film isn’t strictly terrible—it is, for lack of a better neutral word, “watchable”—but it also has no real reason to exist.

With its bleak, yearning tone and defiantly cloudy color palette, “England Is Mine” has a pleasingly granular feel for its era and location. But its imagining of Morrissey as a self-pitying narcissist, a curiously passive intellectual who can’t get out of his own way, soaks the movie in a wearying inertia.

This cannot be about music if you don’t have the rights. So there’s virtually no on-stage performance content. That means you have to downplay the significance of meeting the big musical collaborators of his life, too.

England Is Mine is fussy and prudish — about erotic longing, and about the rock ‘n’ roll that gives form to it.

England Is Mine is a tour ride through a legend’s formative years that’s more concerned with the familiar signposts than the intricacies of the scenery along the way.