Take It or Leave It review – vividly atmospheric formative adventures of future pop princes Madness

Opting for the former is the best idea for this unexpectedly revealing, vividly atmospheric, often funny and alarming, docufictional comedy from 1981 about the rise of the baggy-trousered ska-pop national treasures Madness. It takes us from their beginnings in 1976 to their chart breakthrough: gormless, penniless blokes, obsessing about music and roaming north London’s gritty districts of Camden Town, Stoke Newington and Crouch End. (This elicits some droll dialogue: “They’re all the same, these streets” … “That’s why they put signs on them.”)

Our naughty, dodgy heroes play people’s parties, sign on the dole and do mortifying odd jobs, get told off by site foremen and office supervisors, drive to gigs in Arthur Daley vans, almost get into fights with skinheads and have calamitous arguments with the drummer during rehearsals. It could have carried on like that indefinitely, but the arrival of Graham “Suggs” McPherson as singer is the mysterious ingredient around which everything coalesces: his voice miraculously ups the band’s game, apparently curing their worrying propensity for playing flat. His vocals mesh with the reggae thump of the keyboards and sax and the rest of the band’s goofy jogging-on-the-spot stage energy.

Given the wacky flying-sax videos for which Madness were once renowned, directed by Dave Robinson, the Stiff Records co-founder who also directed this feature, you might expect Take It or Leave It to have been a zany lark along the lines of A Hard Day’s Night. But no. The first half, with a long section in austere black-and-white, is an almost Loachian exercise in social realism, with the band improvising their mopey, mumbling dialogue. Loach himself might admire the scene in which would-be sax player Lee Thompson tries to get lessons and the teacher susses that his saxophone is stolen. This really does give you an idea of what it was like, minute by minute, to be in pre-fame Madness.

The comedy moments are gripping in their gonzo way. There’s a scene where Mike Barson and his pal Simon Birdsall, stumbling along the platform of the kind of London tube station in which the Jam once found themselves at midnight, pick up a couple of discarded phosphorescent neon light tubes and have a very dangerous-looking Star Wars-style lightsaber contest. And we get an absolutely hair-raising visual stunt gag showing what happens when you attempt to drive a van loaded with scaffolding poles under a bridge that is too low. That really is spectacular.

This is a film that doesn’t give you much in the way of context, musical or otherwise, although the band’s contemporaries the Specials are name-checked at one point. If a feature film were to be made about Madness, then the starting point in 1976 would be drenched with background references to punk and the Pistols, the long hot summer, Margaret Thatcher being Tory leader. Not here. It’s just about Madness, and interestingly that feels more authentic than a film with lots of archival references. Take It or Leave It is insouciant and unassuming, and amazingly innocent.