A radio DJ drives from London to Bristol to investigate the death of his brother. Along the way he encounters some odd people and listens to some pretty cool music. Former film critic Christopher Petit crafts a very deliberate homage to the early films of Wim Wenders (who was a producer),even using Wenders's cinematographer and actress Lisa Kreuzer (who may even be reprising her role from "Alice in the Cities"). This is a very slow and uneventful film, but if you appreciate Wenders's existential road films, you should love this one. Sting's debut role here is the best role he ever had as a fanatical Eddie Cochran fan. David Bowie, Kraftwerk, Ian Dury and Wreckless Eric are all featured on the soundtrack.

As enigmatic as its title, Chris Petit's debut film is interesting visually, but less so in other respects, particularly narrative drive and character depth. To be perfectly honest, it starts slowly and decelerates from there, with David Beames' disillusioned disc-jockey setting out to ostensibly look into the death (in his own bath) of his brother. Along the way he encounters obsessive individuals like an unhinged Scottish army deserter, an Eddie Cochran-obsessed garage attendant and a young German woman trying to track down her daughter.

More than likely the film is working at allegorical and symbolic levels I couldn't comprehend, although I did recognise the bleakness of the environment depicted here, having lived through the period as a young adult in Glasgow. I wasn't surprised to see Wim Wenders' name on the production credits, so terribly slow is the I hesitate to call it action, the longueurs broken most frequently by music from the contemporary post-industrial music scene, including tracks by Kraftwerk, Bowie and Fripp amongst others. In fact the music is so dominant at times, you might think the film is the visual accompaniment to its own soundtrack, rather than the other way round.

It's all very stilted and boring however. Some humour might have helped a bit or even some sort of dramatic climax, but I gave up on that hope quite early. As a snapshot of this country suffering economic hardship in a bleak post-industrial wasteland (no change there, then),I just about got Beames aimless and listless drifting as a metaphor for the frustrated youth of the time, distrusting authority, travelling without moving as the saying goes.

Eventually he literally moves to the edge as he ends up on the edge of a precipice, in actuality a disused quarry but by then I had tired of the film's general inaction, dull characterisations, flat dialogue and obscure locations. The camera lingers on and on long after a scene has ended, and what I presume are supposed to be meaningful silences are in the end just awkward pauses.

The Britain of the early Thatcher government was like this visually, grey, cold bleak and pretty hopeless. I'm not quite sure however what I was meant to derive from the main character's "journey", even if in truth he seemed to be on a road to nowhere. I could see cultural cross-references to the music of the day (The Specials "Ghost Town" from a year later would have fitted the soundtrack very well) and also the photography of Anton Corbijn (best known for his work with U2 and Depeche Mode),but as a bona-fide movie though, I didn't get its vaguely film-noir meets urban decay aspiration and might have wished I'd put on a few Bowie and Kraftwerk albums to pass the time instead.

I was born the year after this film released, and have lived pretty much ever since in Bristol, where a large part of it is set. It's very strange to watch a film that you really feel you can identify with (unless you're born in LA). The movie has the feel of my childhood, things hadn't changed much by the time my memories begin, Thatcher's socially divisive reign lasting from 1979 to 1990 coming straight after the economic disaster of the rest of the 70s which had lead to the humiliation to the national pride of Britain borrowing money from the International Monetary Fund.

People were angry back then, they bit given half the chance, strangers in the street or in the park, or the pub, would bite. Some of it hasn't changed at all, young men joining the army because it's less humiliating than working in a factory or going to jail, then they come back from dubious wars unable to reintegrate into society, like the hitch hiking soldier in the movie. The threat of Irish Republican terrorism stayed until I was an adult. My guess is that there was actually an IRA bomb exploded in Bristol during the filming of this movie (17 December 1978); it was the second time the IRA had targeted Christmas shoppers in Bristol. Not anyone I knew, despite all the murders, really had any understanding as to what it was all about, no doubt it had to do with more young men who found doling out violence more attractive than low status lives.

The film is great at hinting at the political storm about to come, and really gets kudos for its clairvoyance. It was very confusing to me growing up as to why only one party (the Tories),were subject to big sleaze exposes in the newspapers. After all, aren't all politicians corrupt and vice-ridden? The radio news story early in this film refers to a group of prostitutes threatening to reveal the names of their clients from the realms of politics and the clergy, as there was a debate going on about whether to relax laws regarding soliciting for sex, and the hypocrisy of some of the participants angered them. The point was that the Tories would publicly speak out in favour of family values all the time, and then go and have a drugs binge with their favourite rent boys. Other politicians did this too, but it didn't make them hypocrites, so the press didn't hound them.

It really was an age of hypocrisy, of adults who had strange bloodthirsty and austere ideas who often didn't practice what they preached. The ugliness of this austerity is shown by the middle aged Anglo-German lady who rants about how the young have no respect, and are selfish because they live without fear, ignoring the feelings of the young woman looking for her child, something that a fellow mother should have found easy to connect to. In this respect there has been some progress, we're more likely to be able to put ourselves in the other person's shoes, and I don't see people walking around angry all the time any more. Hypocrisy is a word I haven't had to use for some time.

At the time the film was made we hadn't quite had such a thorough Americanisation. Robert is refused entry into a club because of his leather jacket, nowadays a pound is a pound, whoever's mitt it's in, and only people who are clearly going to cause trouble (already drunk) are refused entry. A lady I used to work was still upset about going on honeymoon with her man and being refused a room at a hotel because they were wearing leather jackets, about the time this film was made.

Radio on is a disturbing hodge podge of huge social problems, but there are moments of clear beauty, particularly a shot of a lady in a laundrette, whilst a piece of transcendent Kraftwerk plays. The idea of a road movie in the UK is a slightly unusual one given that it doesn't take very long to get from any one place here to the other, so the plot is a little contrived to that end. A very minor complaint in what is an absolute triumph of a movie.