Somers Town reunites the talented writer-director Shane Meadows with Thomas Turgoose, the amazing, fifteen-year-old star of Meadows's previous film, the scalding This Is England. In that movie, Turgoose, playing an emotionally bewildered young skinhead, looked like an eleven-year-old boy with a fifty-year-old face. In Somers Town, which begins with Turgoose's character, Tommo, running away from his home in the midlands, arriving in the title location, and promptly getting stomped and picked clean by three sneering little thugs, turns out to be a kind of buddy comedy, and Turgoose proves himself a surprisingly deft comedian. Tommo strikes up a friendship with Marek (Piotr Jagiello), a sixteen-year-old polish immigrant who has a crush on a French waitress named Maria (Elisa Lasowski). After getting a look at her, Tommo very reasonably decides that he has a crush on her too, and, looking up at her face as it towers over him somewhere in the clouds, he immediately puts her verbal moves on her. He may look a little like a potato with sleep apnea, but having come all the way to the big city (it's big to him) in search of something better, and having discovered that something better is standing in a cafe holding a tray and asking if he wants another glass of water, he isn't about to just let the opportunity pass by. The little bastard is so convinced that he's smooth that he half-convinces you.
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