Let’s get one thing straight. The Wackness is not a stoner comedy, it is a comedy drama featuring stoners. It’s a subtle but important distinction that will make all the difference to your enjoyment of the film. A stoner comedy, not that I am a connoisseur of the subgenre, will feature Rizla-thin characterisation and unlikely situations played for laughs. The Wackness, conversely, is a fundamentally serious rites of passage tale where the humour emerges naturally from the fabric of the story.

Written and directed by Jonathan Levine, the film is set in 1994 though you’d be forgiven from its very brown look for thinking that we’d gone further back into the 70s. The soundtrack will soon dispel you of that idea: high school student Luke Shapiro is a white hiphop fan who says he’s not a virgin but hasn’t actually had sex. That’s just one of the reasons he’s having appointments with psychiatrist Jeffrey Squires (Ben Kingsley: another indication that this isn’t a mere stoner comedy, not known for heavyweight acting talent). And it’s their relationship where the stoner confusion comes in, since Luke pays for his counselling sessions with weed, and bong-tootin’ Jeffrey is looking for a better future just as much as his teenage client is.

Luke is inhabiting a no man’s land between high school and college, not helped by his empty relationship with his parents. Looking for something to occupy himself in the summer, he sells weed from an ice cream trolley in Central Park, and befriends his shrink’s stepdaughter Stephanie. They become close, despite the psychiatrist steering Luke away from his charge, and she relieves Luke of his virginity in a scene that’s funny and tender and plausible; exactly the sort of sex scene you wouldn’t see in most teen comedies.

Yes, it’s the sort of story where everyone ends up where you expect, but that’s true of so many films. What matters is the journey, and the performances. And it’s in this respect that The Wackness becomes so much more than its constituent parts. There’s clumsiness here, and warmth, and confusion, and anguish, and all these emotions are brought to life with relish by the cast. Ben Kingsley is on fine form, a middle aged hypocrite with pompous leonine hair and a line in bogus wisdom that even he finds suspect when it’s repeated to him.

I found it all refreshing and enjoyable, though my friend M thought it obvious and poorly written. It may come down to how you feel about spending close to a couple of hours in the company of characters who haven’t got their acts together. Hey, I do it often enough in real life so can easily excuse it on screen, and personally I found it almost as entertaining in its effortless way as Little Miss Sunshine. Put it this way, if you thought the latter was a formulaic road movie, you’ll find this a formulaic stoner comedy. Make your decision on that basis…

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.

I come not to bury Ken Campbell but to praise him, because even though the old bugger’s gone and died on us I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he pulled some kind of stunt. That would be the Kennish thing to do, after all. Yes, dissatisfied by audiences in the here and now, Campbell is off doing research in the afterlife, and maybe it’ll be up to me to interview him through Ann, the medium I met regarding me writing a script based on her life story. And why not? If it hadn’t been for a medium, Ken would never have bought a huge telly to watch Jackie Chan films on, a story he relates here (Part 1): Part 2 and Part 3.

Ken Campbell has cropped up in my life a few times, and continues to feature in workshops on creativity I do, most recently at DruidCamp, a spectacle that Ken would have appreciated. I was the only male over the age of ten without any facial hair, and felt somewhat out of place because of this, but with his distinctive eyebrows and amazing presence Ken would have commanded DruidCamp, and got up to who knows what antics there. Basically, I use one of Ken’s tales to encourage people to get off their arses and do something fun: if you read about it here you have to promise likewise, OK?

Ken and I met a few times over the course of the last twenty years. First time was, as recounted above, in his picnic bench office in Walthamstow Marshes, where I was happy to listen to him tell me tales of the prophet of Haverstock Hill, and the secret of invisibility (the art of hiding in front of things, it turns out). The interview featured in a comic anthology called Discordia that I published while attending the London Cartoon Centre.

Discordia is the name for the Goddess of Chaos. At least the Roman name. The Greeks called her Eris. I first heard about her in The Illuminatus Trilogy, written by Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea. Discordianism – either a joke disguised as an ancient religion, or an ancient religion disguised as a joke – predated the books, and its ‘bible’, Principia Discordia, is written in part by Kerry Wendell Thornley, a counterculture figure with connections to the assassination of John F Kennedy. All of this improbable stuff, and much more, was brought to life in a theatre production of the trilogy, directed by Ken Campbell. He talks about it here and here.

I saw a few of Ken’s extraordinary one man shows, which are alternately hilarious and moving as he recounts tales of doing productions of Macbeth in pidgin English, expounds on the occult history of ventriloquism, shares his experiences in psychiatric care, and mourns the loss of loved ones by howling along with a huge sled-pulling dog. They are – were – amazing examples of a man determined to get to the outer limits of human experience, who lived to be amazed, and came back to tell the story.

And I came across him from time to time; on a training course in London, at a forum about the state of cinema at Cannon Hill Arts Centre in Birmingham, and after performances at Nottingham Playhouse. He was always generous with his time, a warm and humane presence eager to swap tales and share laughter. More recently, I attempted to engage his services for an event I’ve been involved in. Nothing came of it, though that’s not because of Ken — sad to say, being hailed as a visionary and a genius doesn’t mean it’s easy to put food on the table. If anything, people were wary of employing him. Certainly, if you’d got any kind of preciousness or ego, Ken would be no fun to be around, and that applies to many of those who hold the purse strings in arts circles.

So, what is there to remember Ken by? Some amazing shows that anyone who’s seen will treasure. A scattering of tv and film appearances. And flotsam like the YouTube clips I’ve already linked to. And for me, I’ll keep telling Ken’s tale of the German artist that I already linked to, and hope to inspire people to discover within themselves a fragment of the madcap creativity that drove Ken to make the world a more magical place.