Brian Welsh’s Beats follows a tried and tested feel-good formula; the “last night of adolescence” movie. Two Glaswegian pals are going to be pulled apart by circumstance; Jonno is about to move to the Barratt-built suburbs with his aspirational mom and her new policeman husband, while Spanner is staying behind in the schemes with his cartoon psycho brother. The night in question is to be spent at one of the last, soon-to-be illegal raves of 1994, and so their final night together is also the end of another era, the point at which the free party scene ran up against the Criminal Justice Bill.

Rave nostalgia is a burgeoning mini-industry these days, both as a source of reminiscences for aging pillheads who want to look back on their glory days and for adolescents disposed to wallowing in a sense of pleasurable belatedness. Beats therefore has ample resources to draw its period detail and expertly curated soundtrack from; the welter of rave videos that have been made available on YouTube, the popularization of art projects like Mark Leckey’s Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore, or books such as Exist to Resist which document the exotic lost tribes of the long second Summer of Love in vivid black-and-white. But Beats succeeds in being more than just a clunky coming of age tale in a number of key ways.

One is the way it locates the end of rave within a particular political moment. There are glimpses of New Labour on the TV promising to match John Major’s Tories as the party of law and order. In the formulaic final sequence that sketches out the future trajectories of the key characters, the fact that neither of the main parties opposed the Criminal Justice Bill is pointedly flagged up. Tony Blair, associated in the film with the policeman stepfather, talks of creating a “new Britain” in one clip. Yet, ironically, something genuinely new in the early nineties was the music and culture around rave, and the way it dissolved many of the hierarchies and oppositions of everyday life. Rave seemed to anticipate the genuinely classless, modern society that New Labour promised to deliver, but didn’t, giving us instead the cheap regimentation of Barratt estates and the market-sanctioned superclubs and festivals.