★★☆☆☆

TV and music video-turned-feature director Adam Smith makes an admirably intentioned but disappointing debut that feels lackadaisically cut from the same cloth as the kind of rough British crime dramas we’ve seen a million times before.

Chad Cutler (a charismatic-as-ever Michael Fassbender, pictured) is an uneducated serial thief who lives in a dishevelled campsite in the middle of the otherwise beautiful Northern English countryside. He is bogged down in a world from which he’s desperate to escape in order to make a better life for his family.

He’s being held back by a life he inherited from his father Colby (Brendan Gleeson), who almost wears his ignorance like a badge of honour and would rather his son just stay where he is, living the life of travellers just barely getting by but without anyone from the outside telling them what to do. It’s thinly-plotted in the extreme; the closest we get to a through-line is the police trying to nail Chad for his part in a local robbery gone awry. When that’s the case you need some serious dramatic heft or well-written dialogue or a half way interesting sense of visual panache to balance that out. This sadly has very little of those things.

It’s really only the cast that grabs the attention in what is otherwise quite a half-baked and curiously inauthentic film despite its gruff stylistic leanings and purposefully mumbling, heavily accented dialogue.

There’s certainly passion and a certain thematic reach to be found in this tale of downtrodden lives, class difference and the weight of a family’s past on prospects for the future. But it’s never able to properly grasp and wrestle much of what it presents, leaving instead a scattershot, distractingly quirky and ultimately unsatisfying drama.