Before he was the cranky king of cancelling shows, talking shit, and “bulbous salutations”, Morrissey was once an equally cranky young upstart, writing scathing music reviews, struggling to put together a band, and putting in the 10,000 hours of moping necessary to become a Malcolm Gladwell-style expert in human misery. Now, that earlier period is the subject of a new (and completely unauthorized) biopic, England Is Mine, which sees Jack Lowden play the nascent Moz.
Going off the trailer, the film is more preoccupied with how The Smiths came to be than in the band itself; Johnny Marr (Laurie Kynaston) doesn’t even show up until the final moments. We also get appearances from key figures in the band’s mythology and Morrissey’s (sorry, Steven Patrick Morrissey’s) movement into the musical world, including Jessica Brown Findlay as artist Linder Sterling, and Adam Lawrence as Billy Duffy from The Cult.