No punches are pulled in this gruelling film about racism – and incipient fascism – in late-60s Britain, which is also a parable for what people of colour have to do to fit in and get on. It’s an intensely personal, autobiographical work from actor-turned-director Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, inspired by his own childhood being “farmed”, or adopted, as many children with a Nigerian background were in the 60s and 70s, with white, working-class families in the UK. A little like Shola Amoo’s recent The Last Tree, Farming touches on the alienated experience of fostering and the culture shock of going back to Nigeria.

Damson Idris plays Enitan, who was once a shy, dreamy kid but has grown into an angry teenager, bullied by racist skinheads; his foster mum, Ingrid (Kate Beckinsale) is indifferent. Desperate to find some sense of belonging and family, Enitan finds himself pathetically hero-worshipping the very skinhead thugs who persecute him. They take him on as a pet, and he begins to feel that he is rising through their ranks, although this is an illusion.

Farming is a tough film on a tough subject. There’s not much light and shade – but there can’t have been much light and shade going through it in real life – and Gubu Mbatha-Raw’s role as the concerned teacher is weakly drawn.

This could be compared to Shane Meadows’s This Is England (2006), although Akinnouye-Agbaje tellingly finds no redeeming features whatever in the white skinheads he portrays. Subtlety isn’t a feature here, but rather a combative need to face down the past, before embracing a future of hope.

• Farming is released in the UK on 11 October.