The skinhead culture is one that filmmakers keep being drawn back to, no doubt because there’s a raw vitality in the skinhead aesthetic that spins the reel of a cinematic imagination. First emerging as a working-class English subculture in the 1960s before a second international wave from the 1970s and beyond, the filmic subgenre kindled in the late 1980s before hitting its straps in the 1990s.

Usually regarded as the leader of the pack is Tony Kaye’s 1998 American History X, a film already thematically visceral given true vitality by an electrifying Edward Norton. Across the Atlantic, the British might claim Shane Meadows’ 2006 This Is England as the jewel of the genre’s crown. They’re very different films.

But often overlooked by the old empire and the new one is an earlier masterpiece of the genre, Geoffrey Wright’s 1992 Romper Stomper. It’s a film of excellent quality, not just a documentation of the skinhead subculture, but a romping, stomping narrative stylistically inspired and driven by the flare of the punk music scene often a significant braid in the complex weave of skinheadism itself.

I need to say that the metaphor of a braid in a weave obscures the true complexity of the skinhead subculture; its no unified braid, but more of a knotty entanglement of oft conflicting strands: working-class solidarity, neo-nazism, and music subgenres as conflicting as white-supremacist punk rock and Jamaican ska or reggae. This Is England draws particular attention to some of this knotted irony.

So I’m not looking at Romper Stomper as somehow a filmic emblemisation of a coherent cultural movement, so much as just one wild wisp of a braid, a fray of a larger skinhead entanglement. It’s also notable as Russel Crowe’s cue for his entry onto the cinematic stage, being his first notable film in which he performs as lead.

It’s its own distinctly Australian part of the greater knot: its focal point is the ugly, violent antagonism between blue-collar neo-nazis and Vietnamese immigrants. The latter group swelled in size in Australia as many South-East Asians sought refuge in Australia during and after the Vietnamese War.

The premise of Romper Stomper the ugly history of racial violence instigated in response by far-right white supremacists, a fraternity that marked themselves out with shaved heads, and steel-capped boots, and swatstikas.

Kaye hits the spot with dynamic takes and sharp cuts of editing to capture the rawness of the several urban skirmishes between Hando’s (Crowe) gang and a Vietnamese community banding together in the face of violent prejudice. Crowe’s performance is inspired. He doesn’t simplify the white-nationalist into a caricature of anger, but more eloquently shifts between tonal registers of subdued brooding and eruptive outburst, commanding the following of the gang and audience alike.

As a story, the film, too, does not simplify its plot to a simple two-sided conflict. The unity of Hando’s skinhead gang unravels, in part because of the breakdown of Hando’s romantic relationship with his lover Gabrielle, played excellently by Jacqueline Mckenzie. The breakdown complicates all as Gabrielle betrays the gang to the police and Hando’s right-hand man Davey (Daniel Pollock) betrays Hando by beginning his own romance with Gabrielle.

It's gripping film, full of grit and running headlong towards a tragic end at a blistering pace. It doesn’t tell the skinhead story. Such a story does not exist. But it’s a superb early contribution to the skinhead subgenre of film, a terrifying exposition of the racial prejudice, and, for both those reasons, a film that ought not be left to dim history but one preserved in all its fearsome light.