While North America basked in prosperity, Britain’s grimy, decrepit, poverty-stricken post war period dragged on and on forever.

“When I was writing the film I had an American script consultant,” begins Elaine Constantine, talking to the Straight from the UK. “And he was, like, ‘What the fuck are you writing? This isn’t the 1970s. You’re writing fucking 1920…'” The filmmaker unleashes a broad laugh. “I went, ‘You’re joking, mate! It wasn't until the ‘80s when we all got dishwashers and tumble dryers and washing machines and fridges. A lot of people I knew didn’t even have a fridge.”

A widely celebrated fashion photographer, Constantine’s eye for detail lends a powerful sense of time and place to her feature debut, Northern Soul (now playing), marvellously evoking a mid-‘70s England of dank terraced houses, outdoor toilets, Bruce Lee tracksuits, and cold, cavernous working men’s clubs. “There were hardly any cars,” recalls the 49-year-old Lancashire native. “If anyone had a phone, their parents would have a lock on it. I remember it always raining, I remember it always looking dark.”

Constantine’s ear is no less honed. The film celebrates the brief but massively important moment in British youth culture when everyone was piling into youth clubs, piers, and other adhoc nightspots, pumped on amphetamines and primed to dance the night away to obscure, high energy soul 45s from across the pond. The DJ, suddenly, was king. “I think subsequently it’s been recognized that it was the template for most dance culture that has come after,” remarks Constantine.

“The phrase [Northern Soul] was coined by a southern journalist called Dave Godin, who was also a record dealer, and he was obsessed with black American music. He’d been a schoolmate of Mick Jagger’s. It was him that introduced the Stones to that music,” explains the filmmaker, who developed Northern Soul from its roots as a documentary into the fictionalized tale of two hardscrabble Lancashire teens aspiring to get behind the turntables.

“He understood that it was a working class phenomenon,” she continues. “It was something that wasn’t taking place in London, because London was controlling the charts, and the journalists, and the marketing departments of record companies, who controlled all the night clubs. It was something that didn’t happen in London in that period.”

A look at the period in question is instructive. By 1974, when Constantine’s film is set, Ziggy Stardust had devolved into the infantile glam of Mud, Showaddywaddy, and the Rollers. Even worse, prog was turning everyone’s older brother into a boring, chin-stroking twat. The impact on the adolescent libido of a track like “Too Late” or “You Don’t Mean It” by Towanda Barnes—spiked with a gobful of speed—is incalculable. (A bestselling two-disc compilation spawned by Northern Soul goes even deeper into the era’s rare cuts than the film’s already dynamite wall-to-wall soundtrack.)

The sense of escape is palpable, something captured to heartpounding (and teeth-grinding) effect by Constantine and her young cast. But it’s the evocation of Britain in its long winter of discontent that will give Canadian viewers something to chew on—particularly as embodied by Steve Coogan, providing a cameo as a casually abusive schoolteacher.

“Everything about growing up in the North resonated with him,” she says, adding that she’s in the midst of printing a still from the film for the internationally renowned actor (specifically, a shot of her lead Elliot James Langridge walking past graffiti that reads “Burnsworth is a shithole”.)

“I wrote that part based on just about every teacher I ever had,” she says, with a cheerful sigh. “We had a domestic science teacher, she looked like someone off a knitting pattern, and we'd walk in, all the girls, and the first thing she’d do, she’d go, ‘Blockheads! Shut up!’ And the next thing you’d be a ‘mallet-head’ or a ‘cretin’. There was just no respect at all. We were scummy fodder. No one quite believes it. You’d just get whacked. They were so free with the punches and slaps, these teachers. They were awful.”

True enough. It’s funny what you miss, isn’t it?