Film - Charlotte Raven glimpses a touching story in a noisy display of Brit-flick tricks

The mise en scene of Goodbye Charlie Bright will be familiar to everyone who listened to Parklife, the defining Britpop album of the early 1990s. The Neverland estate, where Charlie and his crew hang out, looks like something Damon Albarn might have dreamt of after a night on the absinthe. There are no dark corners, no scary walkways. Everything and everyone is scrupulously clean and, but for the livid palette, which points to a pop video sensibility, we might be watching a Labour election broadcast.

It is hard to imagine how Charlie and his teenage mates could be bored or disaffected in this scrubbed, amphetamine-bright New Britain. The film tells us that they are, and shows them doing various alienated-youth-type things, but Paul Nicholls, who plays Charlie, doesn't look like a chap whose options have been curtailed by his environment - on the contrary, his newly acquired Smash Hits jawline suggests that he's just passing through, en route to teen pop stardom. This is very disappointing, especially as his performance as mad Joe Wicks in EastEnders had a poignancy that he no longer seems able to muster. He may be more of a heart-throb now, but he's lost that ineffable loveliness that made me fear that my first priority, if cornered by him on Albert Square, might not have been to "sort 'is 'ead out".

The other problem is his accent. In EastEnders, Nicholls was a northerner. Here, he's meant to be from south London but, like most of the other actors, he's as convincing as Eliza Doolittle at Ascot. You can imagine him practising his "alwights" and "see ya's layters", but no one appears to have told him what to do with the words in between. The situation isn't helped by the director's tendency to make his characters communicate in Albarn mockney - a language invented by a middle-class boy who gained his knowledge of the English working classes from Martin Amis and the Small Faces. It worked quite well in Parklife because it was more clearly a fantasy, but here you just get tired of listening to a script that makes every slang word an event. In one scene, the boys are discussing with a dealer what price they can get for knocked-off Bang & Olufsen - an exchange that involves them in every permutation of "pony" and "monkey" - until the script reluctantly moves on to elaborate the eccentricities of another stereotypical "character".

When most modern British directors make films about working-class characters, they leave the comedy and drama to a gallery of picaresque lowlifes who, it is presumed, will make up for the intrinsic dullness of the people in front of shot. I get really annoyed with this kind of film-making because I think it is cowardly. Apart from showing up the director as someone who lacks the imagination to make a real story sing, it betrays a lack of faith in the material. If you don't believe that working-class lives are in themselves interesting enough to make films about, then do science fiction or something. Don't do what Nick Love has done and ruin a perfectly good story in the misguided belief that the audience won't sit still unless some cartoon rogue with more tics than character is capering in front of their faces.

That's what has happened here. The director had the good idea of making a film about the friendship between cool Charlie and the loser mate he has loved since their childhood, but he didn't believe that anyone would watch it. So he dipped into his Brit-flick bag of tricks and pulled out a swearing granny, a couple of comedy cokeheads, and a dodgy car-dealer with a gay streak and a passion for country and western. Now that was a bit more like it. All that remained was to track down Phil Daniels and give him another chance to do that scary face he did in Scum as a Falklands veteran gone sour because his dad never came to meet him off the Invincible, chuck in Dani Behr as a Leslie Ash-type love interest . . . and Bob's yer uncle. That sweet, slight, little story about love and growing up is dressed up in so many layers that no one will notice it's in there.

I noticed. Buried as it was, I could see it. The central relationship between Charlie and his mate was touching, and the best bit was the denouement, where Charlie casts him off because he knows he's holding him back. The expression on the spurned boy's face when Charlie tells him that he's a liability shows the agony of someone unschooled in self-justification. And yet, it came out of nowhere. We knew about their relationship, but we hadn't seen or heard it take place. Where there should have been dialogue, the director prefers to bank on the thumping bassline of a soundtrack that begins with Robbie Williams and ends with Oasis. As "Live Forever" played over the final scene of Charlie running full speed towards his future, I wondered less where he was going than where he'd been.

Goodbye Charlie Bright (18) is showing at selected cinemas

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