You wouldn’t choose your bezzy mate to be the sort of lad who keeps a noose hanging from the ceiling to remind himself of the “absurdity of death.”

Yet Elvis (Boyle) is just that sort of morbid dreamer, a working class fatalist who fantasises about moving to Berlin and lives in a gaudy bedsit cross somewhere between a Bedouin tent and an Afghan heroin processing plant.

He also runs with The Pack, a cough medicine-fuelled gang of soccer hooligans whose dress code - Lois jeans, Forest Hills trainers - is almost as sharp as the craft knives with which they regularly slice the "subbies" - sub-human rivals.

The fall-guy who is transfixed by their psychotic glamour is Carty (Bell) an art school drop-out-turned-office drone who finds himself taken aback when Elvis approaches him at a Bunnymen gig at the legendary Liverpool club Eric's.

Elvis - who you suspect dances at the other end of the ballroom - views Carty as romantic fellow traveller into a world of smack-fuelled artistic abandon. Carty, on the other hand, just wants Elvis to introduce him into the vicious world of The Pack.

Based on Kevin Sampson's novel of the same name, this is essentially Green Street or the Football Factory shunted up the M1, a physically bruising encounter with a bunch of yobs you wouldn't want to meet in an underpass on a dark knight.

An astute soundtack choice pays dividends - the sequence featuring Magazine's The Light Pours Out Of Me segued alongside the adranalin rush of a bonecrushing ruck is one of the film's most inspired moments.

The period detail is also well-captured: lumbering Inter-City diesel trains hauling greasy buffet cars, chintz overload and overcast Thatcherite skies.