RICKY is 19, cocksure, fresh out of a young offenders' unit, and determined to stay out of gun trouble. But once he returns to his east London manor, he is sucked again into the vortex of violent crime.

Ricky is played by Ashley Walters, alias Asher D of the defunct So Solid Crew, who did time in 2002 after being found guilty of illegal gun possession. He is seen leaving the same prison where Walters was jailed, a further affirmation of the authenticity that documentary film maker Saul Bibb has sought to bring to his first feature film.

Hand-held cameras, first-time actors and improvised dialogue add to Dibb's wish to cut away from the flashy films in the mould of Guy Ritchie, Quentin Tarantino or Baz Luhrmann's update of William Shakespeare's Romeo And Juliet. As befits a director of documentaries, his brief is realism, and if one consequence is cinematic mundanity, then so be it.

As in Romeo And Juliet, the central theme posits the philosophy that the older generation must learn from the (very) young to break the spiral of violence and waste. The Bullet Boy of the title, Ricky's impressionable 12-year-old brother, Curtis (Luke Fraser), is the dove of peace, and his journey offers hope that gun culture is not the only badge of honour for disaffected urban Britain.

In Shakespeare's teenage soap opera, a simple bite of a thumb set the Montagues and Capulets at each other's throats. In Bullet Boy, Ricky's best mate, loose cannon Wisdom (Leon Black), is driving him home from prison when he breaks the wing mirror of a car belonging to a gang rival. Swift reprisals escalate in the tradition of Jacobean revenge dramas.

Dibb avoids all sense of glamour in his exploration of themes of friendship, rivalry, loyalty, family blood ties and bloody revenge. Neither drugs nor gang culture comes into play; instead Dibb depicts the seeping influence of the gun on families amid the pressure to conform to the new codes of this claustrophobic urban world.

Young Curtis is torn between the dangerous, destructive life of his brother, where fate and circumstance cut each other up at the lights, and the promptings of his mother (the outstanding Claire Perkins), who sees merit in education.

Walters plays his doomed role with feeling, and no rap-star bull, and Dibb wins points for not playing for street cred. Bullet Boy is a significant new voice in English cinema, rather than a great piece of film-making, but that is more than enough for now.

Updated: 15:28 Thursday, April 28, 2005