Nostalgia, like ecstasy, is a hell of a drug and Kieron J. Walsh’s warm-hearted, hot-headed “Skintown” is buzzing on both. A more polite brother to the “Kneecap” boys and a more cautious cousin to those “Derry Girls” still, the Fermanagh-set friendship comedy sends fizzy, sweetly chemical energy coursing through a rave-romanticizing riff on the coming-of-age formula. The story may not be exactly new, but its bittersweet life lessons are delivered with such retroactive affection and such eagerness by the appealing cast, that if you’re of a mind to complain, well, in the parlance of the movie, would you ever give over, catch yourself on and wise up.
It is 1994, in Enniskillen, unflatteringly dubbed “Skintown” by its denizens and famous for “a lake, an old castle and an IRA bomb that killed 11 civilians in 1987.” Vinny (Jack Rowan) wants nothing more than to get the hell out. Partly, that’s due to the omnipresent dangers of an intractable conflict that has been ongoing since before he was born. (Vinny is 23, though his characterization here skews younger.) But really his disillusion with Skintown is an independence struggle of a more personal kind — one recognisable to anybody who remembers their jaundiced familiarity with their childhood hometown starting to curdle into contempt as adulthood beckoned. When Vinny strikes up an unlikely friendship with Wilson (Hope Ipoku Jr.) a Black squaddie from Manchester who’s been deployed to serve in the universally despised British military patrols, they bond when he realises that for Wilson, joining the army was his escape from the place he grew up in.
