Leeds. Why Leeds?! (Hateful, hateful place; spiteful, spiteful place.)

Middlesbrough, Sunderland, Derby, Nottingham - all of these would have been better, more appropriate choices to host the sole UK press-screening (outside London) of The Damned United. But Leeds, for some unfathomable reason, was selected by distributors Sony Pictures. Leeds at 10.30am on a Monday morning in mid-March.

This meant that, fearing A1 traffic-jams, I was up at 6.30, out at 7.15, into the one-way labyrinth that is Leeds city centre - after taking the wrong exit off the motorway and unintentionally passing by Elland Road - just after 9. Car-park: £7 for four hours; greasy-spoon in the market : £4.50 for Full English breakfast ("Toto, I have a feeling we're not in Jacky White's anymore"). To the cinema (characterless multiplex in city-centre shopping-centre) for 10.10, where I had to switch off my mobile in full beady-eyed view of the security personnel (can't be too careful these days...), and then lights off at 10.32...

The film is an adaptation by Peter Morgan ( The Queen; Frost/Nixon; The Last King of Scotland; TV's Longford and The Deal) of David Peace's book - source of that "hateful place" quote - which was hailed upon its 2006 publication as the best novel about football ever written (not a crowded field, admittedly, but still...) Peace tells the story of Brian Howard Clough, switching metronomically - and, for me, a little monotonously - back and forth between his successful stint in charge of Derby County (1969-73) and his - ahem - rather less glorious spell at Leeds United: Wednesday 31st July to Thursday 12th September, 1974. The most forty-four days in British sport.

The book - rather strangely subtitled "An English Fairy Story" - includes, right in the very first pages, a flashback to Roker Park: Boxing Day 1962, with a 27-year-old Clough standing "in the mouth of the tunnel in ... short-sleeved red-and-white vertical-striped shirt... white shorts and ... red and white stockings." But a collision with the opposition goalie (Shiremoor-born "brickhouse" Chris Harker of Bury FC, as all trivia-bores will know) was to see Clough carried off with what turned out to be a cruciate ligament injury. This clash effectively ended his playing career - though he did return for a somewhat bathetic three final games in 1964.

Despite his Middlesbrough roots (197 goals in 213 appearances, 1955-1961), Clough - with 54 goals from 61 appearances for SAFC - has always been held with something of a legend on Wearside: his feat of 34 goals in a season standing as a post-war record until Kevin Phillips came along at the turn of the century. But many football fans outside the north-east aren't even aware that he even played for Sunderland - indeed, not a few are only dimly aware that he was much of a player at all, such was his success and fame as a manager (the small matter of consecutive European Cups with Nottingham Forest) and as an irrepressible, opinionated, controversy-courting figure in British public life (a committed socialist, not that you'd guess it from the film) throughout the seventies and eighties.

Since Clough's death in 2004, a proverbial "cottage industry" has sprung into life commemorating (some would say "cashing in on") his legendary status: Peace's book, other tomes (including Duncan Hamilton's Provided You Don't Kiss Me, winner of the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award in 2007), a country-touring play (the off-puttingly titled Old Big 'Ead in The Spirit of the Man). Sunderland's very own Toy Dolls got their two penn'orth in long before that, of course, a track on their 1989 album-track espousing the view that "Cloughy Is A Bootboy!" (inspired by Clough's on-pitch altercation with a wayward fan.)

But it's the movie version of The Damned United, starring Michael Sheen as Clough (he was Blair in The Queen and Frost in Frost/Nixon, not to mention Kenneth Williams in the TV film Fantabulosa!), that has propelled Clough back onto the pages of our newspapers and back into the forefront of our national consciousness. It arrives on our screens at the end of what's turned out to be "David Peace month" in the UK, with the TV adaptation of his Red Riding novels airing on the first three Thursdays. Ironically enough, while Red Riding very much has the look and feel of a film, The Damned United plays rather more like an extended telly play.

Much lighter - jauntier, indeed - in tone than the book, which was essentially a repetitive journey into paranoia, existential angst and despair, it concentrates on the relationships between Clough ("a cocky little twat from the north east") and three key men in his life: his long-suffering assistant Peter Taylor (Timothy Spall), his choleric, cigar-sucking Derby chairman Sam Longson (Jim Broadbent) and, most traumatic of all, with his nemesis and bete noire, his Leeds predecessor Don Revie (Colm Meaney.)

It would be pretty hard to make a dull movie from this particular material, but as directed by big-screen newcomer Tom Hooper (his cousin Tobe of Texas Chain Saw Massacre fame being presumably too expensive) the results are decidedly uneven, and frequently marred by some very sloppy anachronisms. Most distracting of all, for anyone with even a passing interest in footy, we occasionally see Elland Road as it looks today, a totally different structure from the near-seatless stadium of the early 70s. And there are several casting-choices that will bemuse viewers familiar with the real-life individuals depicted (butterball Spall, outstanding actor though he is, looks about as much like Elizabeth Taylor as he does the commanding, military-ramrod Peter; This Is England 's Stephen Graham sports what looks like a ginger syrup as Billy Bremner).

Sheen certainly has his moments as Clough, and he's got those nasal, trilling Teesside cadences down pat - I'd say "inimitable", but Cloughy has long been one of those celebrity voices ("Young man...") that everybody thinks they can do. But Sheen never quite manages to disappear into the role as he did with Tony Blair on The Queen - and at times he's poutingly reminiscent of his Kenneth Williams from that TV play.

Perhaps appropriately, Sheen, while front-and-centre pretty much throughout, is repeatedly - and sometimes hilariously - upstaged by Meaney. The Irish veteran, best known for his six-year stint on Star Trek : Voyager, is simply an eerie dead-ringer for Revie - right down to the wavy follicles his very "seventies" barnet - and provides crucial, bluff chalk to Clough's pungent 'cheese.'

Indeed, the film might have more profitably concentrated on the Revie/Clough feud - like the book did - rather than emphasising the stormy but affectionate Clough/Taylor relationship in terms that Hollywood would currently term a "bromance." Early on, they're seen feeding crisps to each other during a long car-ride, and after an ill-tempered fall-out there's a very movie-ish happy ending with Clough grovelling before his estranged colleague/mate ("Please, baby, take me back.")

This is one of several sequences which - in contrast to Morgan's previous behind-the-headlines fiction/fact "speculations" - has the distinct smack of scriptwriterly contrivance, in an picture that's always watchable but in the end doesn't quite do justice to either the book or to Clough, arguably one of only two sporting geniuses the UK produced in the 20th century (the other being, for my money at least, racehorse-trainer Henry Cecil.)

Worth seeing? Well, yes - being generous, I'd give it six out of ten. It's worth a fiver and an evening of your time, so long as (A) you're not expecting any kind of masterpiece, (B) you're not too much of a stickler for historical accuracy, and (C) aren't bothered that the sole mentions of Sunderland are so fleeting - Clough sets his sights on signing "The Almighty Colin Todd", and reflects on how himself and Revie are "peas in a pod" because of their shared Boro roots and spells as players at Roker Park.

And it's probably just as well that B H Clough MBE isn't around to view The Damned United himself. Not just because it depicts him as so prone to four-letter words - one of several objections voiced by his widow and sons - but because such a noted perfectionist couldn't possibly have bitten his tongue when confronted with such a so-so enterprise. As Clough was prone to remark: "Rome wasn't built in a day. But I wasn't on that particular job."

Neil Young

A sometime regular contributor to A Love Supreme over the years, Neil Young currently reviews films for The Hollywood Reporter, Tribune, Jigsaw Lounge and BBC Radio Newcastle.