Eighties classic Withnail and I remains a coruscatingly funny rites-of-passage story

Anyone who’s ever been young, irresponsible and ripped off their face is logically a devout and ardent fan of Bruce Robinson’s 1986 booze, drugs and struggling artist mayhem classic Withnail and I. Or, at least, they would be fans if they remembered what it’s like to have been up for it in a desperate, seductively self-destructive kind of way. This is because the film’s portrayal of its two lead characters, Richard E Grant in his finest hour as Withnail and sensitive lamb Paul McGann as “I”, the two unemployed actors spending their dole money on booze instead of heating, rent and food, is so hilariously, committedly accurate – even though Grant, astonishingly, was (and remains) a teetotaller.

This cult classic was made through George Harrison’s Handmade Films, which also (unsurprisingly, for there are echoes of Python throughout the film) financed many Monty Python-related projects like Time Bandits and the rather pallid The Missionary. It has the happy knack, like Python, of eliciting fanatical and spontaneous script recitals. Robinson’s first-time script is a real beauty for brilliant lines, most related to the deleterious effects of the imbibing and ingesting of vast quantities of booze and drugs.

To wit: Withnail: “I feel like a pig shat in my head.” Or I: “My thumbs have gone all weird!” Or Withnail’s splendid, imperious and self-deluded instructions to the tea-shop lady: “We want the finest wines known to humanity, we want them here, and we want them now!” Or the starving and emphatically non-vegetarian Withnail in the country retreat: “I must have some flesh!” Or the following scintillating exchange, which those of us who have been wasted will probably admit to having had at some stage, as they hunch over quadruple whiskeys and plan to ask Withnail’s Uncle Monty for the use of his “country house”:

I: Let’s phone him up and ask if we can stay in his cottage in the country.

Withnail: No, you phone him.

I: But I don’t know his number – I’ve never even met him …

Withnail: Well neither have I … What the fuck are you on about?

Many comments about the film focus on its two ostensibly “serious” themes, that of the repressed homoeroticism between Withnail and I, which is brought to a head by lecherous Uncle Monty’s visit to the cottage in pursuit of I, and that of its lament for the passing of the Sixties and its counter culture (the film begins, you’ll recall, in London’s Camden Town in late 1969, and Drug Dealer Danny’s archetypal spacehead monologue leaves us in no doubt in the closing stanzas; as he puts it: “The greatest decade in the history of mankind is over. And as Presuming Ed here has so consistently pointed out, we have failed to paint it black”).

These themes are no doubt central to whatever constructive and earnest can be gleaned from this scabrous, underground and coruscatingly funny slice of life, or maybe they’re just attempts to overinterpret what appears on the face of it a very flimsy tale about two drunk and unemployed young acting rakes taking off for a jaunt in the country. But for me the film is most impressive as a perverse and adult rites-of-passage film.

Withnail and I are at the point most of us get to sometime between leaving school and deciding to submit to life’s hard choices, when committed hedonism of the mind-altering bender variety becomes an attractive lifestyle option. As Withnail so memorably puts it: “I’m drifting towards the arena of the unwell.” It’s I who gets lucky and gets an acting role, but by then Withnail, in his closing monologue from Hamlet, is on the cusp between getting out or getting dead. That the film’s pathos comes in such an uproarious package is to its lasting credit.

Brilliant, mental and still hilarious. Just watch out for the huge spade in the bath.