With the Edinburgh International Film Festival winning back some attention after it temporarily shut down in late 2022, we’re beginning to see exactly how its new incarnation will benefit the local industry and get a glimpse of its exact curatorial focus. Kieron J Walsh’s Skintown, premiering in this year’s competition, is one of a few films in that section hailing from the British Isles and carrying more commercial appeal – especially for younger audiences – than the fare that major festivals typically allow to vie for prizes. It will seem utopian to some festival regulars: a competition slate where all of the movies are classically and conventionally “entertaining”.

Set in Enniskillen, Northern Ireland, in the summer of 1994 and named after the town’s tough-love nickname, Skintown follows late-teenage Vinny (Jack Rowan), who spends his afternoons preparing beef ribs at a local pizza joint as The Troubles are raging, and dreams of departing to anywhere but there. With his best pal Jonty (Chris Walley), who’s not-so-secretly in love with him, in tow, they chance upon an opportunity from a loyalist paramilitary to sling 400 stolen ecstasy tablets at Kelly’s, Country Antrim’s liveliest nightclub, with the likely pay resulting from it granting Vinny a chance to finally be done with this place.

Looking at its first audience reactions in Edinburgh, Skintown seems to be playing well, yet for anyone who grew up on attitude-heavy 1990s cinema like Trainspotting and Goodfellas, the film is another quite-familiar walk around the block. Vinny makes his thoughts known through a voice-over especially prevalent at the beginning and end, clearly depicting his resistance to and alienation from where he resides, but it lacks a sense of counterpoint, ironic or not, to the images, which the best examples of this technique always accomplish. And as the drug deal hits its inevitable snag, Walsh and screenwriter Cierán McMenamin (adapting his own 2018 novel) themselves overdose on a bit of hugging-and-learning sentimentality in its aftermath, a slight tonal miscue after the first two acts’ snotty and cynical energy.

A more serious issue here concerns the historical memory of The Troubles, 30 years since the Good Friday Agreement between the British and Irish governments, and Northern Ireland’s political parties, brought a devolved system of government and largely curbed the sectarian violence. As seen in the incendiary Kneecap biopic, Irish film and TV creators now tread towards it with more irreverence, and even bad-taste humour, being a generation removed from those affected by it more directly. Skintown’s rave-culture setting, with the temporary IRA ceasefire assisting the revelry of the story’s fictional events, is a poignant reminder that life had to continue, wartime be damned. The Troubles can’t quell Vinny and Jonty’s spirit on their one-off night of drug-dealing, temporarily landing them the score of a lifetime, yet they’re later reminded how throughout their region, at that particular moment in time, those Troubles were the one thing they couldn’t outrun.

Skintown is a co-production by Ireland and the UK, staged by Keeper Pictures and Cyprus Avenue Films.