Sarah is trying to make the system work Joe is trying to survive within it and also turn a confidently cocky face to the world, as we see in the sharp-witted quips they exchange at their first meeting.
MY NAME IS JOE THOMAS REVIEW PROFESSIONAL
She's a professional carer he's an informal one, regarding the spirited, incompetent team (which he runs with Shanks, a close chum and fellow AA member) as his family it's this which provides the moral and political basis of the film. Sarah's there to see Liam (David McKay) and Sabine Annmarie Kennedy), a pair of young ex-junkies and their small child he's there because Liam is one of his footballers. She drives her car in front of the van in which he's collecting the amateur football team of long-term unemployed lads he manages, and they end up at the same destination. It begins with the resilient Joe addressing a group of fellow alcoholics at an AA group- therapy session and proceeds briskly to his meeting cute Sarah Downie (Louise Goodall), a middle-class health visitor working at a hard-pressed medical centre. The film is a tragi-comedy of love on the dole. He has come of age in a culture of unemployment where everyone is divided against each other and there's no prospect of participating in a revolution of any kind. In Loach's excellent new film, My Name Is Joe, scripted by Paul Laverty, author of Carla's Song, the eponymous 38-year-old Joe Kavanagh (Peter Mullan) has spent his whole life in a deprived area of Glasgow.
In Ken Loach's last two movies, the highly romantic Land and Freedom and Carla's Song, working-class heroes leave a stifling Britain to take part in distant revolutionary wars where the common people are briefly united by a sense of idealistic purpose.