TRANSATLANTIC CULTURE-CLASH buddy movies where sport-centred male camaraderie triumphs over mutual suspicion are nothing new. Take 1938’s A Yank at Oxford. After some scrapes, the said Yank becomes a hero by leading the university’s rowing crew to victory over Cambridge. Sixty-seven years later, we have Green Street, or “A Yank Dahn the Hammers”.

Expelled from Harvard, Elijah Wood’s bookish character goes to London, falls in with the Green Street Elite, a West Ham United hooligan gang not unlike the real-life Inter-City Firm, and beats the others’ distrust by beating up rivals.

Green Street, which adds “Hooligans” to its title in the United States, opens with a cavalcade of cockney clichés. You feel like you should be eating pie and mash instead of popcorn. The firm’s leader initially appears to be a Dick van Dyke for the knuckle-duster brigade: “You’re ’avin a bubble!” he tells Wood’s character.

Visually dazzling, it rapidly improves and conveys the allure of gang violence without glorifying it and avoids crassly simplifying its subject, even though it is obviously made with American audiences in mind. Dougie Brimson, a former Watford hooligan who writes on the subject, developed the story and co-wrote the screenplay with Lexi Alexander, the director.

“We wanted to educate Americans as to why this culture exists,” Brimson said. “ In certain instances we stretched (credibility) too far, but in the main I think we did it, it’s reasonably accurate. The Firm (Alan Clarke’s 1988 TV film), to me, is still the best hooligan movie because it was a movie purely for a British audience, there was no explanation required. That allowed a degree of power over the characters and development of the story that we didn’t have.”

In what is probably the only instance of Gillingham featuring in a Hollywood movie, footage from a real match at Upton Park last year is included and the scenes are among the film’s most powerful. “I wanted the rush that you only get at football, that bonding mentality, thousands of people screaming,” Alexander said.

“We slightly fabricated what we were doing — to West Ham — to be able to film there,” Wood said last month. The club were less than pleased when they realised the true content of the movie. “It maybe doesn’t do West Ham any favours,” Brimson conceded. “The reason I used West Ham is because the rivalry with Millwall is almost universal. It had to be in London to appeal to an audience outside the UK.” The clash between enemy firms from the two clubs is at the heart of the plot, which pivots on a scene featuring The Times.

At least, unlike the moral vacuum that was last year’s hooligan flick, The Football Factory, Green Street has a warning at its core. “The hooligans who are still active hated the film and had major issues with it. I didn’t understand why and I ran out of that screening fairly quickly,” Alexander said.

“Cass Pennant (a reformed West Ham hooligan) explained to me: ‘This is what they live for, you’ve portrayed their weekly high as redundant, how do you expect them to feel?’ Therefore I achieved what I want to do. It’s not glamorising football violence, the message is that you lose everything if you get involved in this.”

“Why do they do it? It’s fun, it’s as simple as that,” Brimson said. “They’re not all thick, they are not all from broken homes. Hooliganism is the original dangerous sport, and the buzz you get from it never diminishes because you never know what’s going to happen next. You’ll never get them to give it up.”

According to Alexander, Wood, like his character, was entranced by the excitement of watching a game: “The first match we took him to was West Ham v Millwall, within seconds he was singing every song that the West Ham fans were chanting, he was caught up in it.” Fortunately not to the extent that the Lord of the Rings star wanted to roam the pubs of Bermondsey offering people outside, but as the film preaches, like hundreds before it, violence is seductive but not the solution.

• Green Street, certificate 18, is out on September 9

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