The setting is 1970s Glasgow, where a strike by trash haulers has left the streets overrun with vermin. While the impoverished Gillespie family waits for a transfer to a new housing project, and while Da (Tommy Flanagan) binges and roars, 12 year old James (William Eadie, a nonpro find) looks for psychic escape, not least from terrible guilt gnawing his guts about the drowning of a neighbor kid.
The parallels with ''George Washington'' are striking, but where David Gordon Green's constricted characters turn inward, Ramsay's vision of solace ripples outward, uncontainable: The enduring image of this vibrant film is a grassy golden field leading to an unsullied, unfinished suburban house, and James' phototropic attraction to freshness amid decay.
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