ANOTHER year, another Ken Loach film, and Mike Leigh can't be far behind (All Or Nothing starts a fortnight run at City Screen next Friday).

Yet this is not just another latterday Ken Loach film, heavy on the polemic, dry and didactic, earnest as John Prescott but with a less direct punch, and angry as a rash. Out goes the agit-prop of Bread And Roses and The Navigators.

Sweet Sixteen presents a raw, no-frills slice of West of Scotland life just as it is, a human, humane and grimly humorous story from the rough end, far removed from the soft-focus Scottish tourism adverts.

In fact Loach is so bent on authenticity that uses subtitles for the first 15 minutes to attune delicate Sassenach ears to the bitumen-thick accent, rather than settling for a neutered version. "Then you and Liam are on your own - nae problem," his explanation concludes.

Liam (Martin Compston) is indeed on his own, in the grey pallor of Greenock's run-down council estates, near Glasgow. His junkie mother is in jail; her drug-pushing boyfriend and his wastrel grandfather do nothing but hinder him; his sister is a teenage single mum; he has long played truant from school to survive on his wits at not-so-sweet 15.

Scally Liam takes to dealing drugs - a tenner for a bag of smack - intent on buying a caravan home and a new life for his mum on her release. This path leads inexorably to 'interest' from the local crime lord who takes this scheming dodger under his heavy wing. Mopeds and pizzas are involved, and here the compassionate Loach veers into melodrama by comparison with his earlier Glasgow epistle, My Name Is Joe.

Just as he did all those years ago with David Bradley in Kes - a Sweet Sixteen for the Sixties generation - Loach introduces an unknown talent in the tough but tender lead role: Martin Compston, a Greenock Morton footballer, who does not so much act as be Liam.

Loach avoids consoling platitudes and provides no remedies, as if daring an indifferent society to respond. Trouble is, inured by familiarity with so many British films dealing in such misery, the heartless response could well be "so what".

Updated: 08:27 Friday, October 11, 2002