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This is England, released on DVD this month, is the kind of film that makes you wish Shane Meadows had directed Quadrophenia. This is England, you see, is not only a riveting exploration of a working class adolescence in a time of unrest, it’s also enriched by an attention to detail that is second to none - something we can’t say about the film version of Quadrophenia.

In This is England, the setting is 1983, a time period that is harder to evoke than you might think: last-gasp flares, un-gentrified town centres, post-punk hair dos, wooden-framed tellies, luxury Ford Granadas, legwarmers, Ataris, Soda Streams. OK, it might not be as difficult as recreating the 1920s - something that the BBC drama department does almost every week - but here Meadows replicates the grubby provincialism of the era with such precision it almost seems to contrast with his deceptively loose approach to acting and dialogue.

So what? you might think. If the stories are convincingly told, what does it matter about a few lazy anachronisms slipping in, as long there’s a general sense of the time period? Well, Quadrophenia is a case in point. The shoddiness of that film’s attention to detail ruins the entire experience.

Released in 1979 and set in 1964, Quadrophenia only had to time-travel back 15 years (easy, you’d think), but instead director Franc Roddam is content to show mod Phil Daniels scootering around on his Vespa in streets that are so clearly awash with the trappings of the late seventies it becomes laughable.

In one infamous sequence, when the mods and rockers riot on the seafront in Brighton, a cinema in the background clearly displays Warren Beatty’s 1978 film Heaven Can Wait on its marquee. (Go to IMDB to check out the rest of Quadrophenia’s goofs. There are plenty.) This sort of thing would be mildly amusing if the material didn’t deserve better treatment.

This Is England is not without its accidental anachronisms, but they are eclipsed by Meadows’ obvious passion for his material, and for the period. There is an expert aesthetic judgement at work here. And by creating a mis-en-scene that is so convincing, the honesty of the mood and the perfomances follow smoothly.

Thomas Turgoose, as 12-year-old-Shaun, fatherless and rudderless until he falls in with a benevolent gang of skinheads, looks and acts as if he was plucked right from a fading school photograph of the era. And Stephen Graham as Combo, an original skinhead from 1969 who’s done time and rejoins Thatcher’s Britain an embittered racist, encapsulates the danger and volatility of the period with a frightening authenticity.

Such character verisimilitude, of course, has been de rigeur in Meadows’ films so far, but This Is England, in its more advanced aesthetic and political ambitions, represents something of a step up. The director seems more than ready now to broaden his horizons, at least beyond the Midlands. Pehaps he could have a crack at something epic and historical, as Ken Loach (a not dissimilar director) went on to do.

We need more directors like Meadows to look into Britain’s past and present a convincing snapshot of an era, even if it isn’t a particularly pretty picture.