It cannot be long before the first slew of Brexit dramas arrives. Divided households, generational rifts, competing notions of Britishness and a 15-rating for bloody violence when the Ukip posse “clears the air”. Tom Hiddleston will play Philip “Spreadsheet” Hammond, alongside Judi Dench’s ponderous Theresa May.

Pending that, the perfect movie tribute is already available: we are living in the real-life remake of The Italian Job. It’s a thought that has haunted me since Michael Gove’s wife, the columnist Sarah Vine, disclosed that her first comment to her Team Leave spouse after the referendum was: “You were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off.”

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By the time we get through article 50 and two-year negotiations for a post-EU Britain, it will be half a century since Charlie Croker chanelled proto-Brexit Britain: the geezer who would rather go it alone on a madcap adventure with no certain gain than bend to existing power structures. Blend Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson and David Davis, add a Douglas Hayward suit, and you have Charlie, ringleader of the bullion heist.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Bridger (Noel Coward slumming it) would have loved May-ite industrial policies.’ Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext/Paramount

Producer Michael Deeley later remarked that he had unwittingly made “the first Eurosceptic film” – with the undertones of us against them, undercut by playful irony about the contest of British and continental pride.

Charlie could go to the better organised Americans, but stays loyal to the home team. He defies Bridger, the corporatist mobster, and persuades him to finance the plot from his prison cell – think Tory Eurosceptic triumph over Ken Clarke-ite centrists. Vote Leave HQ pre-23 June was brimful of Charlies, all inveterate tilters at authority. If its campaign duo, Dominic Cummings and Matthew Elliott, are not somewhere in the English mob when my follow-up, The Brexit Job, is released, it will be a sore casting omission.

So many aspects of the original chime again today. Bridger (Noël Coward slumming it) would have loved May-ite industrial policies, fretting as he does about balance of payments headaches and the “lazy, unimaginative management … driving this country on the rocks”. The economic angst and currency underperformance that dogged Harold Wilson’s government in the late 1960s are back to haunt the Treasury in 2016.

As a snapshot of economic fortunes, the movie is hard to beat. The northern Italy of the 1960s was motoring away very nicely, thanks to il miracolo economico: a Germany-with-sun, as far as deficit-ridden Brits were concerned. Here, sterling crises arrived with horrible regularity: three between 1968 and 1969. Parity of gloom was only restored when Italy had its “hot autumn” of unrest the same year the film came out. Charlie probably had a hand in that too.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘As you’d expect, motors matter a lot.’ Photograph: Ronald Grant

Thumbing a nose against institutional Europe drives the story’s crazy internal logic, as much as Croker’s desire to get rich fast: “Four million dollars! Europe! The common market! Italy! The Fiat factor.” As you’d expect, motors matter a lot, whether it is Bridger’s anxieties about Fiat moving production to China or the Mini Cooper cutting a swath through the Fiat capital of Turin.

Plus ça change. Car exports are what make optimistic Brexiters convinced that Germany will ultimately do a trade deal to keep its car producers content. And who got the first-preference deal on its UK investments but Nissan, the Asian car giant? Mr Bridger (an Express reader) would have been most upset.

May might also gain advice on how to deal with her disputatious cabinet from the Croker school of management: “It’s a very difficult job and the only way to get through it is we all work together as a team. And that means you do everything I say.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘The historian Peter Hennessy sees The Italian Job as a work of genius.’ Photograph: Allstar/Paramount

So we end up hanging over that Alpine cliff edge with no obvious way out. Charlie has a “great idea” – which is pretty much where we are now, between 23 June and article 50. And this is where dispositions divide. If you’re convinced that when all the rows, deals and distress are over, something will turn up and post-Brexit disaster will be bypassed, you are the sort of Italian Job viewer who believes that, somehow, it ends all right. If you are inclined to believe that, for Blighty, whatever can go wrong will, then you’ll dolefully conclude that the coach must go over that Alpine edge.

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Michael Caine volunteered that the best escape idea is for the trapped robbers to run the engine to get rid of the weight of the fuel. This will not quite do, since the bullion would have to be thrown overboard.

The winning entry in the Royal Society of Chemistry’s competition to construct a happier denouement relies on multiple calculations, smashing windows and replacing the bullion, one bar at a time, with rocks. It is the equivalent of pulling off continued single market access while curtailing freedom of movement, regaining sovereignty and ending up with the best of the Norwegian and Swiss models: enticing – just not very likely.

Like all great (mis)adventure stories, The Italian Job reflects in comic form what Britain wants to believe about itself. The historian Peter Hennessy sees it as “a work of genius ... built round the glories and anxieties of the British people”. Cockiness is celebrated and undercut, often at the same time. Even the bouncy “self-preservation society” anthem takes us swiftly from elation to the moment of calamity.

For all the prognostications of national collapse or liberation, it’s hard to tell what will happen to us. “I would not be so sure about the English, cousin,” muses the wiser of the mafia bosses in the film. “They are not so stupid as they look.” Here’s hoping. Over to you, Charlie.