by Paul Hills, Produced by Paul Hills and Tedi DeToledo. Showing tonight at the Liberty Theatre Watching Paul Hills' first feature film, `Boston Kickout', you ask yourself what the builders of Stevenage could possibly have been thinking.

This post-war 'new town' north of London was intended to ease the plight of working-class people made homeless by the Blitz. But it grew up piecemeal, sprawling aimlessly about the fields of Hertfordshire like a suburb in search of a city. It has no central core except for a ghastly concrete shopping precinct with a bookstore full of video games. There is no sense of place, and it is the perfect setting for the anomie and discord in Hills' coming-of-age film.

In the film, Phil (John Simm) and his father move to Stevenage, to a suburban house of indescribable drabness. Nine years later, after a testosterone-drenched adolescence spent hurdling other people's garden fences and smashing their greenhouses, we follow Phil and his friends through a long English summer of change. They have just left school. The reality of a hopeless future starts to close in upon them. Like the metaphor of cars that director Hills weaves through this film, their young lives seem destined to go round in a meaningless loop on an endless gyratory system.

We watch the four friends move apart. Ted disappears after he becomes obsessed with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Steve becomes mentally ill after failing his exams. Matthew marries his girlfriend. But Phil...Phil breaks through a barrier of consciousness and somehow finds his way out into the wider world.

This happens after a rather joyful sexual encounter with his free-spirited older cousin from Ireland, Shona (Emer McCourt). Shona changes Phil's expectations. Clear-eyed and independent, she has had the experience of travel. She urges him to live his own life. Alone. "What would you want to look back for?'' she asks him. Later, when he tries, she rebuffs him. Only then is he finally free to move on, out of the despairing bonds of his childhood.

The `Boston Kickout' of the title is a violent game played to release the frustration and tensions of life in Stevenage. (Versions of it are played all over Britain under different names, with rules suggested by the offending environment: in Cardiff it's the Daffodil Game). Paul Hills played this game when he was growing up in Stevenage. Now, he can describe from a safe remove the isolation of a place "3,500 miles from London'', an inward-looking and incestuous trap. He doesn't live there anymore.

There are a couple of standard ingredients in the male coming-of-age-film recipe. The hero must be more introspective than his friends, but this mustn't be too obvious or he won't have any friends. The adults that surround him must be flawed, and they should also be part of a flawed establishment, so as to provoke sympathy for any and all of the anti-establishment tricks that the hero gets up to. And there must be a woman in his life, an older woman if possible, who must pass on some wisdom to him.

All of these ingredients are in the right proportion.

But I don't want to make `Boston Kickout' seem too formulaic. Although Hills tells an age-old story, it is his own story, and he tells it freshly, enjoyably and with an emotional directness that is very hard to resist. The fact that Stevenage has the highest suicide rate in Britain gives the story an additional poignancy.

And the fact that any change could happen there, except to another television channel, must be greeted like a small miracle.

SYLVIA SHORTO SEDUCTION -- Emer McCourt plays Shona, Phil's (John Simm) cousin, who has great fun in seducing him in Boston Kickout.

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