It has been easy to underestimate, and underappreciate, Ken Loach, by far the most distinctive, profound and consistent filmmaker to work in Great Britain in the last 40 years. Being British has been something of a twin-edged fighting blade for Loach – just as his films routinely get distributed here (although, due to the muddy brogues and burrs, they do sometimes bear subtitles), Loach can be taken for granted. Few conjures his name when global filmmaking heavyweights are enumerated, even though on the European festival circuit a Loach film is considered a privileged annual event. A hard-bitten ultra-realist, and a Socialist provocateur for whom social activism is more important than cinema, Loach may be well be too accomplished at his game for his own good. Last year, with his (roughly) 25th feature (The Wind that Shakes the Barley), Loach again emerged on our shores, displayed his newest prizes from Cannes (he has won more major fest laurels than any other living filmmaker), got his honorable reviews, and then went home, making precious little dent in the skull of American cinephilia.

We, it could be said, simply do not appreciate realism, when it's so convincing you can smell the low-rent rooms the actors inhabit, any more than we care for narratives focused morally on the plight of the real working class. Could it be that we've been trained thus, by a media industry built upon distracting us from how much we spend on entertainment? Whatever: you survey Loach's career, and the ambitions and priorities of most American filmmakers look gauche by comparison. It's also a matter of style: ultra-realism is the most difficult special effect of all, and Loach has unparalleled deftness with naturally-lit docudrama veracity, objective camera manner, and the expressive grasp of off-frame space. He always had it; his first phase, from Poor Cow (1967) and through the '70s, seethes with the same hardcore believability that has marked his career since his "comeback" in 1990 with Riff-Raff and Hidden Agenda. (In the middle, the poverty of the British film industry coupled with Loach's politics and made him more or less unemployable.) The best film from the early years, Family Life (1971), is not only naturalist but a scorching generation-gap saga. But the last film before Loach's "hiatus," Looks and Smiles (1981), is a purer example of his aesthetic, resolutely focused on the matter of socioeconomic injustice as it impacts, in ways looming and subtle, on an unexceptional member of the downtrodden classes. Here, it's Mick (baby-faced non-pro Graham Green), a north-British lad not far from 20 facing a jobless England and little or no alternatives for a future, outside of joining the Army like his friends and being sent to kick down doors in Northern Ireland. This is the same economically destitute, culturally hypocritical Thatcherite landscape that created punk just a few years earlier, but Loach's program sticks close to the spine of the average, undemonstrative, uncertain Englishman. Mick is a guileless, somewhat immature, not terribly bright rube already jaded by weekly rounds of fruitless job interviews and welfare meetings; he'd like to be trained as a motorcycle mechanic, but positions are not forthcoming. The story, from frequent Loach source-novelist Barry Hines, has little arc but tons of texture, as Mick sees his options dwindle along with his pocket cash, and eventually meets Karen (Carolyn Nicholson), a far-from-pretty shoe shop clerk whose own problems at home become the troubled couple's final crucible.

Like most Loach films, Looks and Smiles looks and feels as real as the tenth worst day of your year. Green makes for an oddly inexpressive, unengaging hero – Loach tends toward decreasing charisma in his workaday characters, lest they seem less like us and more like fake cinematic constructions, with superhuman reserves of charm and capability. (His roughneck boyos don't even drink very much, counter to cliche, but rather sip their bitters disinterestedly in crowded nightclubs.) Nicholson is also no movie star, but she's mesmerizingly genuine, with a willful poise, no-bullshit sniff and a voice that sounds like a sleepy bird chirping. Karen is exactly the kind of ordinary girl that eventually becomes a narrow-minded, badly-aging middle-aged mum, whom we commonly gaze upon and strain to imagine what she looked like when she was young. But Loach's achievement here is making the society's inequitable pressure permeate every surface in Mick and Karen's narrative, without melodrama or contrivance – even the daydream of upward mobility has been long squashed. Because Loach thinks people's lives are more interesting than escapist entertainment, the film never capitalizes on our expectations: when Mick finally resorts to crime, it's completely devoid of moral struggle or critical fallout. It's just another facet in his mundane struggle to be an integral citizen, the near-impossibility of which for the run-of-the-mill worker within an exploitative capitalist system is of course Loach's largest point.

Full of rough unschooled humor and local color (as usual with Loach, the accents are not watered-down, and subtitles are a help), and shot in ghostly-yet-incisive black-&-white by Chris Menges, Looks and Smiles is a time capsule – the most you can say for it is that it seals its time and place in amber, and seeing it means learning something real about life among the English lower classes and, by extension, the luckless proletariat of all such industrial societies. Still, Loach doesn't sermonize – his gaze is too indelible, his choices too authentic. He shows rather than tells, and in the showing gets us close enough to his characters to smell their sweat and feel the flush of their frustration. Loach is intolerant of the usual movie baloney in ways American indie-makers often claim to do – if only we had even one lone ranger in our midst to fight so well the good fight.

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by Michael Atkinson