Xan Brooks introduces our double bill of Young Soul Rebels and Bronco Bullfrog. guardian.co.uk

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This week is pop culture week in our British cult classics series – well, sort of. Our double bill is a pair of films that turn fresh eyes on two different London youth tribes of the 60s and 70s: the black street soul of Notting Hill is celebrated in Isaac Julien's Young Soul Rebels, while the white working class suedehead world of Stratford is the focus of Barney Platts-Mills's Bronco Bullfrog. The former was a flagship production of the BFI Production Board, costing around £1.7m in 1990; Bronco was a rough-and-ready £18,000 shoot in 1970, taking off from Joan Littlewood's youth theatre workshops. But both show equal affection for their subjects, and from this distance are each a fantastically revealing window on how teen culture operated – or, at least, how their makers wanted to believe they operated.

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Young Soul Rebels remains Julien's only serious foray into fiction feature film-making; in the years since he's preferred to immerse himself in poetic documentary, like Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask, and gallery-based installation, most recently with Ten Thousand Waves. An art college graduate, Julien has always been an artist first, and film-maker second, but Young Soul Rebels hit a nerve: it's as much a cocktail of late 80s/early 90s obsessions as it is about the period it is ostensibly set in. The story of a couple of soul-patrol pirate radio DJs – one gay, one straight, both black – is threaded with an investigation into a homophobic murder. Julien presents the street culture of the time as a pan-racial, pan-sexual anti-establishment free-for-all. Presumably, though, a film like his would have been untenable at the time. Unsurprisingly, there's a stomping soundtrack of soul classics of the era. Both of Julien's lead actors – Mo Sesay and Valentine Nonyela – are still floating around, mostly doing TV; but one of his bit-part actors has gone on to much bigger things: Sophie Okonedo.

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Bronco Bullfrog, on the other hand, seems entirely hewn out of the fabric of the very life it observes: the same kids, playing versions of themselves on screen. When the film was reissued in 2010, Xan Brooks met director Barney Platts-Mills, and came up with an unimprovable description.

Bronco Bullfrog plays out around the estates, cafes and bomb sites of Stratford. It charts the fortunes of a pair of star-crossed lovers, Del (Del Walker) and Irene (Anne Gooding), whose budding relationship is beset by nagging parents and a cash-flow shortage. Meantime, idling behind the net curtains at the local greasy spoon sits the mythic Bronco Bullfrog (Sam Shepherd), a Borstal runaway who schemes to rob a goods train and abscond with the loot. [Director Barney] Platts-Mills sets the cast in motion and chases them all the way towards a poignant hanging ending. Along the way he rustles up a brisk, bracing, slice-of-life drama, a casual portrait of late-60s 'suedeheads' kicking their heels and dreaming of escape. The directing is rough and ready; the performances are a little rude and unschooled. In the end, of course, that's all part of the appeal. "The kids came to us," Platts-Mills says. "We gave them time off work and paid them double the wages, and their idea of acting was to give us more or less what they thought we wanted. More often than not, that's better than the alternative." He shrugs. "People always talk about 'naturalistic acting'. No such thing! What they are doing is taking the piss, undermining the process. Look at the way Del stands there sometimes, all silent and moody. That's just bone idleness on his part. But I like that. That's a real person caught there in the frame."

If that's not a recommendation, I don't know what is.