The last time Queens Park Rangers made it to the big screen, the poor old club played the victim in a horror film. Starring Flavio Briatore and Gianni Paladini in roles that could have been played by Vincent Price and Bela Lugosi, The Four Year Plan was definitely only suitable for adult audiences.

Just about the first words heard in the film were from Briatore, newly installed as the club’s chairman in the summer of 2007 and passing judgment on a reserve striker: “I want to fucking sell this idiot!” Such was the standard of mature football analysis that led the Italian entrepreneur to go through six managers in two and a half years at Loftus Road after buying the club in partnership with his F1 pal Bernie Ecclestone, the Indian steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal and the Spanish fund manager Alejandro Agag.

Briatore quickly won a reputation for telling his managers which players to pick. The film showed him sending Paladini from the directors’ box to the dugout to give orders about substitutions. When poor results led to increasing abuse from the fans, he infamously proclaimed: “I want the names of the people who are booing me, or I will sell the club.”

He had stepped down from the chairmanship by the time Neil Warnock took over from Paul Hart, who had lasted a mere five matches. By quickly securing promotion to the Premier League, Warnock enabled Briatore and Ecclestone to claim that everything had happened according to the timetable they announced when their consortium took over: the four-year plan of the film’s title. The two men immediately sold their combined 66% holding to Tony Fernandes of Air Asia, the present owner.

“Football is more than just 11 players on a field,” Briatore had announced at the start of his time with QPR. “It’s a brand as well.” What he didn’t include in that assessment was the significance of the club’s supporters. Until, that is, they gave him his very own chant: “Bri-a-tore, he’s a wanker, he’s a wanker.”

Now the fans are getting their own time on the screen in a film called R’Story, which paints a portrait of the club’s modern existence largely from the fans’ perspective. In doing so it reminds us that even at a time when clubs throughout English football are having their traditions and stability undermined by changes of ownership, certain things remain constant – and they are mostly to be found passing through the turnstiles.

The most powerful words in R’Story come from Robert Elms, the radio presenter and a lifelong QPR supporter. A long time ago, Elms says, he realised that when you give your allegiance to a club, what you are really supporting is your fellow supporters.

That reminded me of some words attributed to the late Bobby Robson, containing a sentiment impossible to imagine being formed in Briatore’s mind: “What is a club in any case? Not the buildings or the directors or the people who are paid to represent it. It’s not the television contracts, get-out clauses, marketing departments or executive boxes. It’s the noise, the passion, the feeling of belonging, the pride in your city. It’s a small boy clambering up stadium steps for the very first time, gripping his father’s hand, gawping at that hallowed stretch of turf beneath him and, without being able to do a thing about it, falling in love.”

R’Story is mostly told through the experiences of people who do not earn a penny from their involvement in the club but whose lives revolve around it. The voices in the film include lifelong fans such as Elms and Glen Matlock, an original member of the Sex Pistols, as well as a former star, Rodney Marsh, and the current club captain, Joey Barton – who will miss the team’s next three matches in the fight against relegation, having been shown a red card in a 2-1 defeat at Hull City last weekend.

Elms describes supporting QPR as “an affliction”, one that he has passed on to his son. “You plough through a lot of rubbish,” he says, “which makes the highs even higher.” That is a sentiment with which fans of many other clubs will identify – although the nature of its location means that QPR’s story is not entirely typical.

Local affluence may be draining the club of natural support. “The people who live in Notting Hill now don’t want to go and watch QPR,” Elms remarks. On the other hand many younger football fans, members of the area’s remaining multicultural working-class communities, have been priced out of the experience.

The film is the work of the Octavia Foundation, a west-London community trust trying to change the lives of young people suffering the consequences of unemployment, ill health and social isolation. Co-operating with the leaders of QPR’s own community programme, they gave a couple of dozen volunteers the chance to become camera operators, interviewers and production assistants.

Aged between 16 and 24, the volunteers were guided by Max Robson, a production assistant whose work on a previous Octavia Foundation film, about four women involved in local politics, led him to formal studies in practical film-making. Some of the novices, encouraged by a foundation which reckons that every £1 it spends creates £9.88 of social value, have already begun to use the experience as a first stepping stone to a new career.

Fans – including rabbi Ariel Friedlander, a former sports photographer who inherited her love of QPR from her father, also a rabbi – reminisce in interviews about the brief golden eras embodied by the wayward brilliance of Marsh and Stan Bowles. But we are also shown the club’s community trust at work today, running a Down’s syndrome football team and keep-fit classes for the over-60s. It seems a great deal closer to the kind of reality most of us might recognise than the sight of Briatore and his sidekicks travelling to a match by helicopter or devising a scheme to save £500 a match on hospitality-box floral arrangements.

R’Story reminds us that when things turn really bad, it is the fans who become the saviours of last resort, the one true foundation of their clubs. The film does not aspire to match the professional gloss or the headline‑grabbing power of The Four Year Plan. But when QPR fans gather to watch it in cinemas and small theatres and community centres in the coming weeks, they will see nothing to embarrass them and, as their team continue the struggle to stay in the Premier League, much to make them proud.