By 
There's a scene in England Is Mine where Steven Morrissey has his grandiose and self-important diary entries read back to him, making public the utter disdain he feels at being surrounded by people far less intelligent than himself.
It's a prescient portrayal of Morrissey, whose very mention these days is usually accompanied with an eye-roll or a disclaimer about being a 'fan of the music, not the man' and some gag about his widely derided of forays into memoir and novel writing in recent years.
But while Mark Gill's biopic of the Smiths' frontman, out this week, doesn't hold back on showing the singer's arrogant streak, it only appears in flashes. Instead the director's story is that of a confused young man, drifting through an ordinary life long before anyone thought he was extraordinary.
The unauthorised film (as if Morrissey would sign off on anything) follows the teenage years of the maudlin Mancunian. It recounts his years wallowing in existential angst, imitating Oscar Wilde and struggling to get a band together while inadvertently insulting all he meets.
Taking on the character is Jack Lowden who, in addition to not growing up a Morrissey fan, looks, as he admitted to Esquire last month, "nothing like him." The film is, "more a portrait of him at that age than a carbon copy", he says.
Lowden, currently riding the wave of praise for his performance as RAF pilot Collins in Dunkirk, gives a transfixing account of these formative years which concludes tantalisingly with a practise session in Johnny Marr's bedroom as the Smith's begin. This, coupled with the narrow, pre-fame timeframe, allows you to switch off your preconceptions about Morrissey - something that's been hard to do for a long time, even for some of his biggest fans.
England Is Mine does more than that, though. It has been described as a "love letter to Manchester" and the city is certainly contending for a leading role. There are despairing shots of rainswept King Street, throbbing parties at The Haçienda and trips to see Patti Smith at the Manchester Apollo - coincidentally where he meets Johnny Marr - which give you a taste of what the Manchester music scene was like then, or at least how people choose to remember it.
Part of the film's surprising charm is that it feels like a coming-of-age story that could be about anyone growing up in that time in that city. An overriding theme is Morrissey's sense of painful isolation, shown in scenes where he shuts the rest of the world out. "He certainly locked himself in his room for days and blacked out the windows with bin bags and wouldn't move in bed," Lowden told Esquire. Watching the angst and depression he suffered, like many of us, during his teenager years, it's difficult not to empathise with Morrissey. It reminds you of the vulnerability behind the sardonic humour of some of his most famous lyrics - "I am the son / And the heir / Of a shyness that is criminally vulgar".
It's hard to believe this Morrissey, who even seems to walk like he's afraid of the world, would go on to demand his autobiography be published alongside Homer and Virgil as a Penguin Classic, though perhaps his aforementioned diary entries are a warning.
Somehow, seeing him in breathtakingly mundane clerical jobs for the civil service and Inland Revenue makes it easier to sympathise with the divisive, infuriating man he is today.
But even if you still can't forgive the Morrissey we've ended up with, at the very least it's enjoyable to imagine him quietly fuming over a Quorn burger and searching England Is Mine for the most minuscule of plot holes to rage over.
"I would love him to love it but Morrissey being Morrissey who knows?" Lowden said diplomatically. "I hope he at least gets to see it. If he hates it then I don't care, but I want him to see it."
England Is Mine is out 4 August
