So, here we are again. Somers Town, the latest from Shane Meadows. I wasn’t expecting wonders from what I’d heard in advance, and didn’t get them. Instead, what was served up was business as usual: a tale of young men doing the things that young men do, reasonably depicted and amusing enough, but without any insight or bite.

You’d think that after making several films around the same theme Meadows would have either got to the bottom of his fascination with emotionally immature young men or moved on from it. Sadly not. Which is a shame. One of Shane’s favourite directors is Scorsese, whose fascination with Italian American life results in acute and insightful films. OK, not fair asking Meadows to match the man who made Goodfellas and Raging Bull, but there’ll come a point — it it hasn’t already arrived in Somers Town — when getting actors to fart around in gear from a second hand shop might outstay its welcome.

The thing is, Meadows talks a good film. Having seen him discuss his work, I’m left in no doubt about Shane’s ability to charm backers into supporting him. And there are moments and more when he delivers the goods, and those tend to be when he finds something dark to explore. It’s there with the creepy guy Paddy Considine plays in A Room for Romeo Brass, there again in Dead Man’s Shoes — co-written by as well as starring Considine — and it’s written all over This Is England , his look at the racist aspect of 1980s skinhead culture.

Somers Town stars Thomas Turgoose, the teenage star of This Is England, who runs away from Nottingham to London. He befriends a Polish teenager, Marek, and the pair of them bond over their attraction to a French waitress. Which is pretty much it: the rest is taken up with amusing but slight stuff about the lads goofing around. It’s kind of charming, but not much more than your own memories of twatting about in your teens, which were I suspect a golden age for Meadows.

Paul Fraser’s script has its sweet and funny moments, but really there’s not a whole lot happening here, and it’s not as charming as Meadows presumably thinks it is. There are a few plot holes, too, something I wouldn’t mind if there was anything keeping my attention from them, but in the absence of substance I couldn’t help but question what I was seeing.

The lads end up in Paris by the end of the film, where — don’t ask me how — they find the marvellous waitress of their dreams. Which brings another point to mind: most real women would be seriously disturbed to find out that two teenage stalkers had fled London to seek them in Paris. But credible female characters are in short supply in Shane’s world. Besides, if she’d called the gendarmes on them it might have spoiled the cosy atmosphere of it all, upsetting the film’s funders, Eurostar.