‘7 Miles Out’ Review: Carol Morley’s Coming-Of-Age Drama Channels The Rebellious Spirit Of ’70s Youth

The north of England has always had a mystical rock’n’roll landscape all of its own, and while Liverpool will always have The Beatles, Manchester — less than an hour’s drive away — will forever be the thinking muso’s mecca. Michael Winterbottom’s anarchic 2002 film 24 Hour Party People, a loose biopic of local impresario Tony Wilson, does a fabulous job of looking back on the incredible music scene that followed in the wake of an early performance there in 1976 by London punk pioneers The Sex Pistols. Exec-produced by Winterbottom, Carol Morley’s 7 Miles Out — a moving and sometimes almost unbearably honest film that recently premiered at the London Film Festival — tells a similar story while it’s still happening, a coming-of-age drama that, likewise, starts in 1977.

“Things change, times change,” says our narrator Ann, played first as a young pre-teen by the charismatic Amelie Hughes. Ann lives in Stockport with her parents and older brother Scott (Kasper Hilton-Hille), who is working as a journalist on an inky rock paper down in that-there London that isn’t, but might as well be, called the New Musical Express. When we first encounter him, Scott is listening to “1977” by The Clash, a manifesto for the times with its call — nay, demand — for “no Elvis, Beatles, or The Rolling Stones”. At this stage, though, Ann is more interested in playing her recorder.

Ann is concerned that their father, Ronald (Aiden Gillen) is late home, a fear that is assuaged when he returns home with a new bronze company car for his prestigious new job in Manchester. For viewers of a certain age, Morley’s film reflects exactly what that would mean for a young girl in the doldrum suburbs at a time when James Callaghan was the country’s drab center-right Labour prime minister and unemployment was over 5%. Ronald, however, doesn’t seem overly fussed about it, or anything at all, and Gillen’s economic but gnomic performance will only go on to gain greater significance over time: Ann remembers the last day she saw her father, and like the rest of the film it is a split second that leads to a lifetime’s obsession with paths taken and choices made.

Ann gets older, growing up to be played by Lucy Halliday, who exudes the same naïve energy in a more worldly body. Like her brother, Ann is obsessed with post-punk music, and the film kind of brilliantly how silly and yet how life-or-death important it was to have a musical tribe in the grey 1970s. Ann’s most burning desire is to see local heroes Joy Division play live at The Russell Club, a place now almost as hallowed as The Cavern Club in Manchester lore. The quest for tickets is the first of several McGuffins in the film that, while fun, bring to life the essential truth that the core of being teenage is the shiny allure of intangible pursuits, those things that promise fame, friends and being cool.

But the great thing about 7 Miles Out, though, is that it doesn’t look down on that, rather it’s a reminder of how refreshingly and abrasively inspirational that time was, even if you weren’t at the epicenter (the title refers to the distance between Ann’s home in Stockport and Manchester, a gap she rectifies before the end). The unashamedly Manchester-focused soundtrack reflects that, with deep cuts from the likes of The Fall (“Futures and Pasts” being especially effective), Magazine, The Durutti Column, A Certain Ratio, Crispy Ambulance and even former Velvet Underground legend Nico, who lived in the city briefly.

Though they aren’t on the soundtrack for historical authenticity, perhaps the most famous band of the time — the Buzzcocks — are present in scenes set in a period-correct record shop. Nevertheless, their late singer Pete Shelley gives the film its closing song, “Yesterday’s Not Here”, an electronic solo piece released in 1981 and presumably written in the high-heat of post-punk’s that-was-so-last-week hubris. There’s such a thing as caring too much while affecting not to care at all, an adorable contradiction that British pop music was very into at the time, and Morley’s film brings that back, notably in scenes that see Ann forming her own amateur band that, try as the director might, don’t quite capture the enchanting mélange of talent and ineptitude that powered the early ’80s.

The more serious part of the film, which arguably gets a little lost during the film’s ambitious running time, is the concept of male suicide, which becomes writ large when Ian Curtis, the lead singer with Joy Division, hangs himself of the eve of their first American tour. But then again, this isn’t so much a film about sending messages as about how such messages might be received; how friendships are made, and how things unspoken can be joyful and positive, just as many other things that go unspoken — “on the hush-hush” — are most definitely not.

The clue to this disarming film’s appeal is raised by its title: What is it about the forbidding seven miles between Stockport and Manchester, and why do they matter? It reflects a lyric in Joy Division’s 1979 single “Transmission” in which Curtis sings of “Touching from a distance / Further all the time”. Space, time and distance are all integral parts of these kinds of stories, and particularly in music, a seam this film mines so very well. But beneath the pop-culture surface, this is also a story of families, about all the chatter and the cacophonous who-knows-what that goes on when a parent dies in unusual circumstances.

And yet, bizarrely, what seems like an entirely parochial story will surely have legs worldwide. The history of music has always been regional, and 7 Miles Out speaks to all the boho post-punk scenes that broke out not only all over the UK but in the US too, in Atlanta, Ohio and especially Seattle. Kurt Cobain would’ve dug it.

Title: 7 Miles Out
Festival: London (Competition)
Director/screenwriters: Carol Morley
Cast: Lucy Halliday, Amelie Hughs, Aiden Gillen, Gemma Whelan, Leila Entwistle, Kasper Hilton-Hille, Clare Grogan, Jim English
Sales: Cannon And Morley Productions
Running time: 2 hrs 7 mins