‘The State Of Us’ review: A boisterous Bradford night out turns sentimental in dewey-eyed UK debut

Dir. Ollie Gardner, Jake Harvey. UK 2026. 90mins

Two Northern lads get in a bit of carpe diem while the going is good in The State of Us, a collaborative debut by Ollie Gardner and Jake Harvey, experienced producers working in theatre and TV respectively. Premiering in competition in Edinburgh, it’s a boisterous, sometimes spikily amusing and, in the end, somewhat dewy-eyed affair, headlining zestfully lifesize performances by Samuel Bottomley and Callum Scott Howells as two young friends embarking on a memorable night out.

 The generally sweet tone is closer to a latterday Likely Lads 

A softer touch than initially promised, and boasting a somewhat generic bromance at its heart, it is unlikely to receive widespread exposure – although overseas outlets and fests with a taste for accessibly gritty examples of the ‘Typically British’ may well take an interest.

Set and shot in Bradford, the film begins with a young boy, Frankie, visiting a local hilltop with his dad to scatter his mum’s ashes. When haggard Pa produces his hip flask, it’s a sign that all won’t go well – and sure enough, Frankie is soon seen moving in with new adoptive parents and their young son, Taylor. Years later, Frankie, now 19 (Bottomley, one of the holidaying lads in How To Have Sex), is seen mounting a night-time break in to an institutional-looking building.

The scene is shot and paced to suggest a robbery – in fact, the building is a hospice and Frankie is there to visit Taylor, Tay for short (Madfabulous star Scott Howells), who’s being treated for advanced cancer. Frankie plans to take his lifelong pal for a night of partying and soon whisks him off in his car – but not before much salty backchat, and a brisk interlude with another patient. She’s a ripely abrasive elderly woman (Frances Barber), who enlists the boys to help her to the toilet – a nervous Frankie fearing the worst – before entrusting them with a necklace for her granddaughter.

Not exactly taking their mission seriously – although Tay is the more conscientious of the two – the boys con a shopkeeper into giving them whisky, then head to a house party, where they have a brush with the resident tough and where Tay clicks, all too briefly, with a young woman (Safia Oakley-Green).

Essentially playing out over a night and a morning, the action kicks off exuberantly, with a scabrous edge to the dialogue and touches of scatological comedy – although the generally sweet tone is closer to a latterday Likely Lads rather than to the gross-out goofiness of, say, Inbetweeners. The register shifts fully towards the intensely heartfelt when the boys start to have a serious talk, Tay delivering some urgent home truths. Not quite convincingly, we’re asked to believe that the irresponsible, cynical Frankie, whose flippancy masks deep-rooted despair, attains a new awareness literally overnight – but that’s the challenge facing any drama that compresses its emotional trajectory into such a narrow timeframe.

It would all pay off more effectively if the film didn’t opt quite so determinedly for sentiment in the final third, and if Harvey’s screenplay was not so casual about following up (or not) its narrative threads. The film is also overinsistent on its brief cuts back to the boys’ childhood, or in its use of songs (by Tom Ogden, from indie band Blossoms) that spell out the emotions on screen.

The Northern-accented delivery isn’t always 100 percent accessible, the leads’ exchanges suggesting a sort of Yorkshire mumblecore. But the rapport between Bottomley and Scott Howells – who generously plays frazzled straight man to Bottomley’s bumptious trainwreck – comes across as natural and tender, with a nice rhythmic bounce. Oakley-Green, recently in 100 Nights of Hero and Anemone, makes an impression as the flirtatious but elusive girl who catches Tay’s attention. And Barber gives characteristically good value in a prickly character role – although the film rather heavily leans on the convention that anyone of a certain age shown puffing on a joint automatically equals comedy gold.