Like most folks, I loved the album first. I don't think there's a better piece of recorded music by any band than The Who's Quadrophenia. The movie follows the album so very lightly though. I really don't think you need to know the album or story when you watch this. Phil Daniel was so great as Jimmy. I hope he was nominated for some acting award and Franc for some directing award. So many great scenes. The one that hits me most hard every time I see it is during "The Bellboy" scene. After all of the negativity in Jimmy's life, he sees Ace's GS. Things are better. Or are they? I always get a lump in my throat on this particular scene. The last 10 minutes are spellbinding. I can't believe more folks don't know about this movie. Being from the American south, the accent took me 3 times of watching to understand almost anything. Be prepared.

Some films need to be watched to witness subtleties in the actors' faces, and other films need to be listened to as the plot unfolds; even now with all the technological wizardry, the dialogue is what carries the motion picture. Sadly Quadrophenia lacks both of these necessities. It gets 2 stars for the soundtrack by The Who. That, and the line about comparing Brixton to Calcutta. The 1960s should have been a good time, because WW2 was over, Europe was at peace, we landed on the Moon, and made huge gains in medicine and science. What we got instead was Kennedy's assassination, the Vietnam War, drug abuse, hippies, mods and rockers, and the sexual revolution. The upshot is Jimmy -- a loser at best, and a lost soul at worst -- seeks to find himself by imitating all the losers around him. He has a job, but doesn't do it, he has a girlfriend for whom he feels nothing, and parents who somehow neglected to raise him properly. It's just awful. Simply awful with no redeeming value. Toxic.

From the creator of Masterchef, here is something Franc Roddam made earlier. A film about being young in the 1960s being part of the Mod subculture and alienation and angst with some good tunes and a lot of future cast members of Eastenders if The Bill had not go to them first. Phil Daniels gives a career defining performance that should had got an Oscar nomination as Jimmy who has a mundane job , boring home life with parents who do not understand him and lives for the weekend clubbing with friends, popping pills and getting into scrapes with his mates.Jimmy and his friends go off to a bank holiday weekend in Brighton, he wants to get close with girlfriend Lesley Ash, in awe to cool dude Sting and gets in a rumble with greasers.However Jimmy gets more disillusioned losing his job, friends and family. Seeing Sting as just an ordinary bell boy sends him to the edge.The film quickly became a cult classic, This Who produced film led to the revival of the late 1970s & early 1980s mod scene. It has some cool tracks, a lot of humour, earthy language and a cast of now familiar actors. In a sense its like a British version of Saturday Night Fever and director Franc Roddam gives this drama a sense of rawness and some vitality when you see the action scenes in Brighton.

I'm almost finished reading Pete Townshend's autobiography "Who I Am" and have been listening a lot to the Who's original double album of the same name so the time was right to finally watch the big-screen dramatisation of the record. I'm just a bit too young to remember anything about the vicious Mods v Rockers pitched battles at Brighton or the Mod lifestyle (I'm not sure just how far north it made it up to Scotland, it always seemed to me principally a London-based movement).Nevertheless, the broader themes in the film of the generation gap between teenagers and their parents, the pain of rejection, youthful revolt against authority plus the less intellectual need for young kids to get drunk, drugged, violent and sexed up are universal and seemingly constant, which with the background of great 60's music, made for an engrossing and enjoyable if occasionally challenging watch.This is Phil Daniel's Jimmy Fenton's worm's eye-view of life in the mid-60's, working in a dead-end job, out of touch with his parents and although on the face of it, there doesn't appear to be much to rebel against, sure enough, he loses his way and his mind as he suffers rejection from his employer, said parents, would-be girlfriend Leslie Ash and after seeing his Mod Hero '"ace-face" played by Sting, meekly conform to society mores carrying bags at a hotel, he gets pushed over the edge (literally). His only way out of the tormenting feelings he's experiencing for the first time sadly involve just a one-way ticket.The film adopts a realistic, warts and all approach, with no let-up in the levels of bad language used, scenes of drug use (although it is "only" pill-popping "uppers" or "blues" as they're called in the film) and of course the centre-piece of the film, the recreation of the infamous Mods and Rockers "Battle Of Brighton" of 1965. There's some earthy humour though to leaven things, particularly two Mods encounter in the dark with a bunch of sleeping rockers, although one or two stray elements of sentimentality (Jimmy's heart-to- heart with his long-suffering dad, his friendship with an old pal turned rocker) slightly jar. Fan as I am, I could have done too without the too obvious genuflecting to the film's producers The Who (Jimmy putting on the "My Generation" single at a party, then gazing in awe at the band on "Ready Steady Go"), I guess he who pays the piper and all that.Central to the movie is a superb performance by Daniels as Jimmy, his mood-swings oscillating violently as he takes or comes off his pills, wired to the moon as we say today. His energy and vividness set the tone for the whole film. Interestingly director Franc Roddam (later the creator of "Auf Weidersehn Pet" and, ...er "Masterchef" on TV), changes the ending and placement of songs from the album, but there's no denying the memorable climax to the piece.In the end I was transported not only back into the era depicted, but more importantly into the head of "helpless dancer" Jimmy and would state that the movie well complements the great album The Who originally released, a rarity in "rock" movies.