The relationships in “Look Back in Anger” are like jazz: hot and heavy. Full of passion, joy and sadness.

Considered one of the first “kitchen sink” or “angry young man” dramas to emerge out of the British social realism film movement in the 1950s and ‘60s, “Look Back in Anger” is a volatile and often vulnerable look at real domestic problems plaguing real people. There is nothing sugar-coated about the 1958 adaptation of John Osborne’s play.

Jimmy Porter (Richard Burton), the film’s antagonist, is a university graduate with a penchant for jazz and a hatred for the bourgeois, stuck working at a sweets stall in the local market. He lives with his wife Alison (Mary Ure), and their friend Cliff (Gary Raymond). The Porters have a less-than-ideal relationship; it is full of passion, the kind that pulls you under covers even while it makes you want to pull out your hair.

Jimmy loves Alison. He and this is often the source of their numerous fights. “If only something – something would happen to you, and wake you out of your beauty sleep! If you could have a child, and it would die,” he tells her. At that moment, unbeknownst to Jimmy, Alison is pregnant, and will eventually lose the baby, and suffer in the very way he wishes.

Sometimes it seems as if Cliff is the only thing keeping the entire family from imploding upon itself. He is reserved, sweet almost to a fault, and a bit socially awkward.

He tries protecting Alison from Jimmy’s frequent and often violent outbursts, but he is also very fond of Jimmy, despite his faults. “I love those two people very much and I pity all of us,” he says.

Things come to a head when Alison’s friend Helena (Claire Bloom), who is acting in a local play, comes to stay with the Porters. Jimmy hates Helena and she disproves of his treatment of Alison. She persuades Alison to leave Jimmy and go to live with her parents. After Alison leaves, Helena and Jimmy have a vicious argument, which strangely ends in the two of them making love. The two enter into a strange relationship, and the film seems to mimic its own early shots, this time with Helena playing the role of Alison.

One such pointed scene is when Jimmy and Cliff are horsing around while Helena is ironing; they accidentally knock Helen’s writing case off the table. Earlier in the film, the men were playing around while Alison was ironing, and Jimmy shoves Cliff. He knocks into Alison and the pair goes spilling onto the floor, the iron falling with them and burning Alison.

Burton, often overshadowed by his legacy as husband to Hollywood seductress Elizabeth Taylor, is brilliant as Jimmy. Sure he’s an “angry young man,” but Burton brings rich complexity to the character.

Jimmy is a man that is his own worst enemy; he sabotages his relationship with those who love him, he keeps himself working in the market when he could, as Helena says, do anything in the world.

He is simultaneously impenetrable and completely vulnerable. He wears his emotions on steel sleeves.

We see Jimmy at his weakest after his surrogate mother Mrs. Tanner dies from a stroke and Alison returns after her miscarriage. The two stand in the train station.

“I know I'm a lost cause, but I thought if you loved me it didn't really matter,” Jimmy says.

“It does matter, I was wrong. I don't want to be neutral, I want to be a lost cause,” she replies. And there they are two lost causes against the world.

The relationships in “Look Back in Anger” are like jazz: hot and heavy. Full of passion, joy and sadness. Life, like jazz, is about improvising. There is no script.

While this film clearly has a script, its writing is gritty and raw, mimicking the reality of the working class. It has a poignancy that can only come from unabashed honesty.

The plot is stripped down and minimal: the stage is clearly for its players and their actions. Nothing is expected. Jimmy and Alison’s reunion at the film’s conclusion leaves viewers scratching their heads. And there is no answer.

Sometimes people are compelled by forces beyond love or reason. Sometimes there are no answers, no matter how hard you look.

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