Michael Sheen Scores in The Damned United

In the 1970s, Brian Clough was one of the best-known figures in Britain. A talented soccer player whose career was cut short by injury, he went into management, leading not one but two unfashionable clubs to the English championship and then winning the European Cup two years in a row. He was a clever, cocky, working-class hero with an opinion on everything from Margaret Thatcher (against) to striking miners (for). Brilliant, needy, self-destructive — he was an alcoholic and had a liver transplant before he died in 2004 — he combined humor, bombast, friendships and rivalries in a long and very public display of how to be charming and really messed up at the same time.

In Tom Hooper’s new film, The Damned United, British actor Michael Sheen takes on Clough. Like the two roles he’s best known for — Tony Blair in The Queen and David Frost in Frost/Nixon — the part was written for Sheen by British playwright Peter Morgan, their sixth collaboration. Unlike Blair, Clough is barely known outside Britain, and The Damned United is unlikely to get a wide release. That’s a shame; great though Sheen’s Blair and Frost were, his Clough is of an even higher order, combining psychological insight with dead-on accuracy.

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The Damned United is based on an extraordinary 2006 book by British novelist David Peace, an account from inside Clough’s head of the 44 days in 1974 when he managed Leeds United, a bunch of talented thugs who were then the best club in England, while embroiled in a fierce rivalry with their former manager Don Revie (Colm Meaney) and smarting from a bitter quarrel with his best friend Peter Taylor (Timothy Spall). Sheen, 40, has just the pedigree for the part. In his youth, he was a talented-enough soccer player to be offered a trial by the London club Arsenal, and he proves on film that he hasn’t lost his touch. He comes from Port Talbot, the same South Wales steel town that produced Richard Burton and Anthony Hopkins. Sheen says he spends three months studying characters, “looking at every bit of footage I can find and every book about them that’s been written” and ferreting out their weak spots. In Clough’s case, he didn’t have to look hard. For all his braggadocio, Clough wore his vulnerability on his sleeve.

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It’s Sheen’s ability to get under the skin of people we think we know well that makes him so compelling. His Blair may have a longer afterlife than the real one; Sheen will play the former Prime Minister (in a role again written by Morgan) opposite Dennis Quaid as Bill Clinton in The Special Relationship, due in 2011. Meanwhile, he moonlights, literally, as the werewolf Lucian in the Underworld series, and he’ll appear as the vampire Aro in the upcoming Twilight sequel, New Moon.

As for The Damned United, American audiences may find some aspects of the film unbelievable. Did British soccer players really have hair like Klaus Kinski’s at the end of Aguirre? (Yes.) Was northern England in the ’70s really that damp, dark and miserable? (No, it was worse.)

But the film is worth seeking out, and not just because of Sheen’s extraordinary performance. In his research, Sheen discovered that Clough loved Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, the 1960 Karel Reisz film, starring Albert Finney, about a young working-class iconoclast and self-mythologizer — just like Clough. The Damned United is an homage to films of the British new wave — Saturday Night, A Kind of Loving — in the way that it exposes how Britain’s old class divisions stunted countless lives. Clough and Revie were intelligent men for whom soccer promised a release from a life down the pit or in the factories. Then they discovered that the game was run by small-town businessmen with patronizing attitudes straight out of Dickens. The wonder is not that both men had a chip on their shoulder; it’s that it wasn’t a bloody plank.

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