If you savor what the British call kitchen-sink realism, Shane Meadows is a director you need to know. His turf is the working-class of the Midlands region.

For his previous film, "This is England," Meadows cast Thomas Turgoose, a remarkably natural young actor, as a bullied boy who becomes a skinhead. The kid actor is back, with a funnier haircut, in a sunnier Meadows production called "Somers Town," portraying a Midlands runaway who is befriended by a Polish immigrant boy in London.

This 70-minute exercise in stripped-down cinema is an offbeat pleasure to watch, but it's only about two-thirds of a movie, with vivid characters, authentic atmosphere and just the faintest wisp of a story.

Heavy-lidded, lumpen Tomo (Turgoose) arrives by train from Nottingham with little money and no place to stay. After some local urchins divest him of his backpack, he tries a similar swindle of a Polish boy he spots in a diner. But Tomo backs down when he realizes that shy Marek (Piotr Jagiello) is a budding photographer with a crush on the friendly French waitress, Maria (Elisa Lasowski).

Tomo wheedles a change of clothes and a place to crash from his new friend, who insists that the scoundrel sleep under the bed to hide from Marek's father (Ireneusz Czop), whose immigrant buddies are renovating the train station across the street from the high-rise tenement.

The final, tart seed in this slice of life is Graham (Perry Benson), a failed Fagin who enlists the boys to rent out deck chairs in an empty park.

Just when this black-and-white, microbudget movie seems poised to spring an indictment of the Dickensian social order, it ends, but in a redemptive ray of color.

"Somers Town" could be regarded as an allegorical tale of two cities, one a place of hard times and one a place of great expectations. Or it might simply be an unfinished draft of a character-driven comedy whose author decided to paint the town.