Absolute Beginners

Directed by Julien Temple
Starring Eddie O’Connell, Patsy Kensit, David Bowie, Ray Davies, James Fox, Lionel Blair, Sade, Robbie Coltrane

Critically maligned at the time, Julien Temple’s wildly ambitious musical is ripe for reappraisal in all its cinemascope glory starring David Bowie, Sade, Ray Davies, Patsy Kensit and Eddie O’Connell. 

Set against a backdrop of emerging teen culture and rising racial tension in late 50s London, Colin MacInnes’ cult novel is brought to the screen in Julien Temple’s exuberant musical adaptation with a who’s who cast of music luminaries from Bowie and Ray Davies to Sade.

Colin MacInnes’ era defining 1959 novel vividly captured the new cultural phenomenon of the ‘teenager’: rejecting the post war ennui of their parents, hip to new currents in music and relishing the multiculturalism of London’s Notting Hill.

A 1980s cinema adaptation at the height of music press like the NME, style magazines like The Face and irreverent postpunk music television programmes like The Tube would seem to be a perfect moment. However, Julien Temple’s much anticipated film Absolute Beginners with a who’s who cast of music luminaries from Bowie and Ray Davies to Sade and Slim Galliard was caught in the crosshairs of the imminent collapse of key British film company Goldcrest (the film would be blamed not only for that collapse but also of the entire British Film Industry) and the high esteem which MacInnes’ book was held.

Viewed from a distance of nearly 40 years and without those twin pressures, Absolute Beginners is excitingly ambitious cinema continuing in a visionary British cinematic lineage set by Powell & Pressburger and whose dialogue between 1950s and 1980s pop culture and rising racial & political tensions speaks as pertinently and presciently to today.

c/o BFI National Film Archive with thanks to Park Circus.

Cinema Rediscovered On Tour is a Watershed project in collaboration with principal sponsors Park Circus and StudioCanal. With Support from BFI Audience Projects Fund awarding National Lottery funding.