Riff-Raff (1991)

Patrick 'Stevie' Logan (Robert Carlyle) is a Scottish-born "squatter" (homeless man) having just been released from prison who is sleeping on the rough streets in London, England. He seeks employment on a building site which is an abandoned hospital that is being converted into a housing estate to be made up of expensive and furnished apartments.

Stevie gets the job along with around a dozen other "riff-raff" (low-income, working class) men in Tottenham. Learning that he is homeless, Stevie's new workmates Larry (Ricky Tomlinson), Mo (George Moss) and Shem (Jimmy Coleman) volunteer to find him an empty flat to squat in Twyford House, a nearby housing estate in South Tottenham. One day, Stevie meets a struggling brunette Irish actress and singer named Susan (Emer McCourt) when he finds and returns a handbag belonging to her. At first wary about meeting Stevie when he shows up at her rundown house at Spensley Walk, Stoke Newington, Susan eventually warms to him by inviting him in her house for tea. This chance encounter leads to a turbulent relationship. One evening, Stevie rounds up some of the men from the building site to support Susan at one of her pub gigs where she sings "Always On My Mind". The drunken audience is initially hostile over her sub-par singing voice, but Larry shames them into calling Susan back for an encore and she sings "With A Little Help From My Friends", which is much better received. When she gets evicted from her house over repeated late rent payments, Susan agrees to move into Stevie's flat, where they are happy for a time. On the building site, life continues as a series of small escapades and petty misdemeanors. Larry is vocal in his left-wing political views and opposition to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and the ruling Conservative party. No one shares his view that politics is important to their real-life situation. Meanwhile, the management sack men for minor misbehavior and are only superficially interested in safety. One eccentric worker, named Smurph, is sacked for playing cards with his workmates while on the job. On one payday, since most of the employees do not have bank accounts, including Stevie, to deposit or cash their paychecks, they ask a fellow employee, an African immigrant named Fiaman, to cash their paychecks for them in exchange for paying him five pound sterling per check. Fiaman does cash their checks and gives them their money, but they go back on their word and pay him only five quid (pounds) instead of five each. Another day or two later, Larry gets into a minor accident when he falls in a port-o-potty toilet on the site and is soiled with fecal matter. So, he sneaks into a vacant furnished apartment on the site to help himself for a bath, only to get discovered by a female real estate agent showing the apartment to a group of veiled Muslim women which prompts him to flee, wet and half-dressed, from the apartment and back to the building site. Meanwhile, Stevie and Susan's relationship becomes strained. Susan tends towards negative emotions associated with her lack of career success. Stevie, on the other hand, can be callous and unsympathetic to both his and her plight. One day, Stevie goes to a local theater where Susan is auditioning for a spot on a local play and when she is rejected by the director and casting agent, he approaches the men and threatens them which prompts them to have both him and Susan removed from the area. Susan takes out her anger on Stevie who feels that he ruined her changes for the acting gig. One day, after hearing his name on a radio, Stevie phones his home and finds out that his mother has died, so leaves to attend her funeral in Scotland. In his absence, Susan starts using heroin dealt by three youths on the estate. After his mother's funeral, Stevie refuses to stay in Scotland and hitchhikes back to London where he enters his flat and discovers Susan getting high by shooting heroin. This precipitates the end of their relationship which prompts an argument over his directionless life and her lack of career choices. Susan pays Stevie a visit at the building site in which he tells her to quit doing drugs or their relationship is over. Susan leaves and when Stevie returns home after work, she is gone.. having departed for places unknown. A day or two later, Larry is sacked from the site after requesting safer working conditions. After jokingly making an expensive phone call on the boss' Gus Siddon's mobile phone, Shem also gets the sack (and is arrested for the assault that follows). Near the end of the building work, Desmonde (Derek Young), a young West Indian construction worker, falls off the roof of the converted hospital and, despite Stevie and Mo's efforts to save him, he loses grip and falls to the ground and is severely injured. The cause of the accident is unsafe scaffolding, which the men have already warned about. This incident marks the last straw for Stevie and he decides to get back at management. In the final scene, Stevie and Mo return to the building site in the middle of the night and set a huge fire in the building and watch as it burns to the ground before fleeing into the night as the police and fire brigade arrive on the scene.