The enduring mystery of what Michael Caine is thinking and feeling remains intact during his watchable, if somewhat exasperating docu-reminiscence of 1960s swinging London. It certainly doesn’t say anything revealing or new about the man itself. With many images of smiley hippies and apoplectic people in bowler hats, the film is narrated by Caine in his inimitably measured and inscrutably deadpan style: the script is evidently the work of Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais whose 60s TV classic The Likely Lads sadly goes unmentioned.

David Bailey, Joan Collins, Sandie Shaw, Twiggy and Paul McCartney are interviewed here by Caine, though oddly and disappointingly off camera, their voices the accompaniment to old footage. Caine has said that he didn’t want the audience distracted by these faces all looking shockingly older. Well, it is a shame to diminish these people’s actual presence in the film, though there are some extraordinary archive moments here, and the film is all but stolen by the young and breathtakingly beautiful Joanna Lumley talking about how hilarious it is to work with the photographer Duffy.

The welfare state, a growing economy, free education and the pill created the conditions for postwar freedom and anti-establishment irreverence, a cultural aftershock to the Attlee victory of 1945. And these pop singers, hairdressers, photographers and movie stars had ideas above their station, promoted to a dizzyingly exciting central position in popular culture. It was a working-class, or at any rate middle-classless movement. Caine does not, however, mention that he and these other fortunate celebrities were unrepresentative. For most people outside London and indeed inside London, 60s life actually trudged on as it had done in the 50s and 40s.

Anyway, they were Caine’s “generation”, although they were mostly a bit younger than Caine, who was in his early 30s when he found stardom in Zulu and Alfie. Caine had come up from the East End though hard graft; he’d consolidated a strong work ethic in rep and avoided the drug experiments and live-fast-die-young affectations of many pop stars and associated media celebrities, who had perhaps covertly modified a posh person’s dilettante attitude, having money and contacts to fall back on.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Celebrity culture … photographer David Bailey with model Penelope Tree. Photograph: PA

My Generation is mostly about rock stars: Jagger, Lennon, McCartney, Daltrey, Burdon. (Sadly, Cliff Richard is evidently not considered weighty enough to be interviewed.) There is also some entertaining material about pop art and what they did to help drearily monochrome, pea-soupy London get to be more colourful. There is oddly little about cinema in Caine’s documentary. The posh voices of Brief Encounter are teased; there are some clips of Alfie, Zulu and The Italian Job and bits of Albert Finney and Tom Courtenay – but nothing from Antonioni’s Blow Up. Similarly, nothing much about TV and theatre, and nothing about that quintessential standard-bearer of the irreverent 60s: David Frost.

Michael Caine: ‘Boy, did we have fun…’ Read more

Interestingly, literature had gone through what passed for its own revolution the decade before with Colin Wilson, Kingsley Amis and the angry young men. A dismayingly pompous Anthony Burgess blathers on about how “youth considers itself wise like a drunk man thinking himself sober”. Stuart Hall gets a tiny cameo talking about what the new currents in youth culture meant, but there’s nothing here about the whiteness of swinging London. Caine talks cheerfully about “birds”, an expression for which he apologises to the “ladies”.

Without entirely intending it, the film shows that the one institution in British life that remained stuffy and staid was the press. There’s a glimpse of a newspaper hoarding, advertising a warning about hippies by Billy Graham, written by that hungry young journalist Jonathan Aitken.

My Generation valuably reminds us that many people of the older generation really were very, very cross about the upstart counter-jumpers of the 60s revolution. There were grumpy gents and tetchy twinset ladies who were interviewed on TV and they didn’t realise or mind how absurd they sounded. It wasn’t just cultural or political. It was the age-old envy and hate of the old for the young. Nowadays people conceal it more carefully and make satirical jibes about “millennials”. Replace that phrase with “young people” and today’s droll commentators sound an awful lot like the purple-faced types who demanded that Mick Jagger got his hair cut and did some national service.