The latest screenplay from Peter Morgan ("The Queen", "Frost/Nixon"), the story is about Brian Clough, a young English soccer manager who had a spectacularly short and unsuccessful stint as the manager for Leeds United in 1974.
At the time, Leeds United had dominated the English soccer world for many years. Their manager, Don Revie, had just taken a job as the manager of the English national team and Clough was offered the job.
The team went from the top of their division to the bottom immediately and Clough was canned in 44 days. In some respects, this is the antithesis of the sport film, as it shows defeat, rather than victory..
That said, it's really a story about ambition and relationships -- the two key relationships being that between Clough (played by Michael Sheen) and his assistant (Timothy Spall) and the one between Clough and Revie (Colm Meaney), although the latter mostly exists in Clough's head.
Sheen provided one of the most striking performances I've seen at TIFF this year, a creature possessing both unstoppable ambition and a complete lack of self-awareness.
Highly recommended.
As a sidenote, there was a line in the credits about "crowd hair supervisor". Given the time period (1968-1974), the film is full of some of the most remarkablely awful hairstyles captured on film.
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