Christie Malry is a simple man. Determined to improve himself by becoming an accountant, he instead uses his new-found understanding of double-entry book-keeping to draw up a reckoning between himself and society at large, placing a value on every wrong done against him with the aim of extracting a similar value back through increasingly extreme means.

B.S. Johnson's 1973 novel Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry is a fascinating work on both a narrative and technical level, succeeding as both a novel and an anti-novel, post-modernist literature written long before post-modernism became the creative curse we know it as today. Its central concept was straightforward but inventively and at times ingeniously handled, its casual rejection of the moral values of society both surprising and somehow satisfying. Throughout the story Johnson refers to the fact that you are reading a novel, and in one chapter engages in direct dialogue with his lead character about the nature of the narrative he is involved in. Anyone attempting to make a film of such a work, one that is going to connect with an audience and affect them emotionally and intellectually, is taking on one hell of a challenge. That screenwriter Simon Bent and director Paul Tickell took on this task is admirable, that they did not completely nail it is both disappointing and frankly unsurprising, but they have still created a film that intermittently captures the anarchic spirit of the original and is still a very worthy and sometimes satisfying work that is worth cheering. That it has, however, remained largely unseen in the very country in which it was created is more than a little dispiriting.

So what happened here? Why was the film not widely released and widely seen, despite being BAFTA nominated? I mean, how many inventive, original British features actually get released each year? And when one does come along, why is it almost immediately buried? Well there are a number of reasons, none of which cut any ice here. The novel itself, though acclaimed and recognised as an important work, is not as widely known nowadays as it should be, and is hardly going to find itself on the reading list for GCSE English courses. No instant tie-in hook there, then. And then there is Christie himself, a million miles from the do-good heroes of modern US films, a man who effectively declares war on society in general and graduates rapidly from small-time vandalism to mass murder, an amoral domestic terrorist who destroys not for political or ideological reasons, but to balance his reckoning with Them, society at large, everyone, including you, gentle reader. Ah, starting to see the problem? Well there's more. With the film complete, getting a distribution deal was proving difficult, and after some months it still had not appeared on UK cinema screens. Then September 11th 2001 happened and western attitudes to terrorism changed and just no-one wanted to touch the film. It was to be almost another year before Christie Malry was to get it's overdue cinema release, and then it was effectively pulled after only a few screenings. It crept out on DVD virtually unnoticed at a budget price. This is all wrong. I may have issues with certain aspects of the film (and the DVD, as it happens), but it's still a classily made, often inventive and in many ways unique work that boasts one thing most recent British and American movies tragically lack: it has balls.

The traditional path of making your leading character sympathetic and identifiable really wasn't open to the film-makers here, Malry being an urban terrorist with essentially selfish motives, but screenwriter Simon Bent and Paul Tickell have recognised up front that a character does not necessarily have to be likable to be interesting, and Christie is certainly that. Shrugging off the book's own pre-post-modernist style, director Tickell adopts a very formal approach, a mixture of carefully composed, locked-down compositions, smooth tracks and eye-catching top shots. This gives the film a very observational feel, and creates a reality that is also slightly unreal, something that is reflected in the largely non-naturalistic but still engaging performances. In particular, Nick Moran plays Christie two steps away from real life, an ordinary bloke slowed down to 33rpm, perhaps taking Johnson's description of him as "a simple man" a little too literally but still nicely underplaying a part that could so easily have been camped up. When he tells girlfriend Carol (referred to as The Shrike in the novel) he loves her, for example, there is an almost comic edge to his voice and delivery, yet at the same time there is a sincerity to it that convinces you that he means it. We never get really close to Christie, but the observational nature of the direction, the extraordinary nature of his quest and Christie's own moral ambiguity keep him at just enough of a distance for us to remain interested in him without feeling betrayed by his actions or behaviour.

It is to the film-makers' considerable credit that they have been largely faithful to the novel, which can't have been an easy sell to possible funding sources, and it's when it does adhere to Johnson's inspired vision that the film is at its strongest. This goes beyond the recognition factor of seeing something you admired in print reproduced faithfully on screen; for evidence of this, you only have to look at the scenes that were not in the novel, which for the most part just do not measure up. The most glaring example is the attempt to expand on the quotes from Fra Luca Bartolomeo Pacioli (the Benedictine monk who, in his 1494 work Suma de Arithmetica Geometria Proportioni et Proportionalita, is first credited with having recorded in detail the system of double-entry book-keeping) that appear intermittently in the novel by intercutting Christie's story with a series of extended fifteenth century flashbacks to Pacioli's relationship with Leonardo Da Vinci. Lushly photographed and sincerely performed, they may well tell an interesting tale in themselves, but it isn't half as interesting as the one being told about Christie. And broken up into small segments which have only a minimal link to the main story, they prove difficult to get involved in, especially when the story they are effectively interrupting is the real meat of the film. Without these flashbacks, which have the content, character and tone of a more traditional historical drama, Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry would come close to true anarchist cinema – it (largely) refuses to pass judgment on its protagonist and finds genuine fascination and occasionally undisguised glee in his actions. For a conservative audience this may represent a problem, but for the rest of us, especially those of us for whom the twee Britishness of the likes of Notting Hill, Love Actually or – bloody hell – Wimbledon is both depressing and stomach-churning, this is a liberating experience.

Well, almost.

There is a purity to Johnson's version of Christie Malry that makes the story work so well. He is driven by that one simple thing, to balance his reckoning with Them. Though the film-makers have largely stuck to this, they have added the suggestion, something confirmed by the commentary track, that Christie is also irresistibly drawn to the sound of breaking glass, supposedly triggered off by the noise of a bottle breaking during his conception. This can't help but dilute the single-minded simplicity of Christie's purpose, suggesting that rather than making a conscious decision he is in fact responding to an unconscious need that has been with him since birth. More irritatingly, this gives rise to one of those scenes that always get my back up, where a song on the soundtrack spells out what his happening on screen – as Christie blows up the tax office, we are treated to a (rather good, it has to be said) version of 'I Love the Sound of Breaking Glass', and are eventually presented with an on-screen hailstorm of, yes, broken glass. This is a real shame, as elsewhere Luke Haines' simple but haunting score is most effectively used.

Spoiler alert: If you don't want advance information on scenes towards the end, and the end itself, skip past this section by clicking here.

It's after this point that the cracks begin to show, and the inventiveness and originality start to slip a little. A scene in which the images of Christie's mother and his workmate Headlam turn up in a bar to play Angel and Devil and rather obviously debate the morality of Christie's actions is clunky and unnecessary, and the pub revolutionaries, who were only represented by their dialogue in the novel, stretch the concept of cartoon characterisation a little too far. A bigger problem, especially for those familiar with the novel, is the ending. In Johnson's version, Christie finds he has a lump, which is diagnosed as cancer and very rapidly kills him (in a chapter most ironically titled 'Now Christie really does have Everything'), a completely random event that he is unable to build into his reckoning, and which ultimately leads to him canceling his debt. In the film, he is blown up by one of his own bombs on the way to destroying the Houses of Parliament, a twist that can't help but come across as judgemental – he who lives by the bomb, dies by the bomb – and has a rather establishment-weighted 'poetic justice' feel to it, deflating the feelings of liberation the earlier moral ambiguity had prompted, at least in me. This is followed by a funeral that seems to mock Christie's hatred of the church and a completely unnecessary scene in which girlfriend Carol discovers Christie's ledger, plus all of his drawings and plans, and thus learns just what he was really like, a scene made all the more unpalatable by the cheesy round-up montage of earlier scenes.

All of which is a huge shame, as together with the distracting trips back to the fifteenth century, this leaves us not with an intriguing, brave piece of work, but half of one. But I would still suggest that this half alone is a damned sight more inventive, more interesting and more chance-taking than most other British films of late. There is still a refreshingly amoral anarchy running throughout most of the main narrative, and the technical handling is often very impressive, repeatedly belying the film's small budget. In the end the film, like Johnson's story, appeals to that little part of me that, after a day of being repeatedly wound up by the activities thoughtless idiots, wants to go nuts in a supermarket with a machine gun, and I've got a very soft spot for any film in which the lead character cheerily dismisses the the church as corrupt and deceptive and reasons that he is owed recompense by society because of "No God and false promise of salvation."

In some ways this is a very good transfer. Colours are strong, sharpness is good and black levels are generally spot on. There is minor artefacting in areas of one colour in places, but it is rare. The problem is that we have not the anamorphic widescreen print the film demands, but a cropped 4:3 one, which really does mess with Reinier van Brummelen's handsome photographic compositions. To make matters worse, the opening credits are in non-anamorphic 1.85:1. Thus, despite a decent selection of extras, there is a sense of a half-arsed job here that director Tickell should complain bitterly about.

The soundtrack is Dolby 2.0 stereo, but the separation is often very good and the tonal range excellent. If you have DSP modes on your amp, re-channel the bass through the subwoofer and you get some kick-arse low frequencies in places. 5.1 would have been nice, of course, but as Dolby 2.0 tracks go, this is a good 'un.

Considering this disk can be picked up for about a fiver and the picture has been cropped, the number of extras on offer here is genuinely surprising.

The first is the best, a screen-specific commentary with director Paul Tickell and lead actor Nick Moran, though neither are identified by name on either the menu or the track itself. (The DVD case suggests misleadingly that there are two seperate commentaries.) This is an informative and sometimes entertaining track, giving plenty of background information on the filming, and certainly answered some questions I had about how the hell they'd got permission to film a scene in a real water processing plant in which the city's water supply is poisoned. Technically there are a couple of issues, however. Putting aside the fact that there is no film sound at all (comments on dialogue are thus a tad abstract), there are a couple of loud pops in places and the commentary itself is out of sync with the screen action by a good fifteen seconds, resulting in sometimes animated discussion on a specific shot that dies down and moves on before the shot under discussion appears. This is very shoddy and should have been picked up on before release.

The trailer sells the film rather well (not much use if no cinema shows it, of course) and is presented non-anamorphic 1.85:1, so is in the correct aspect ratio, something the main feature is not, rubbing salt in the wound, somewhat.

The photo gallery is a one minute montage of production stills set to music. To be honest they all look as if they've been grabbed from the film itself. A 1.85:1 version, no less.

Film and characters is a 4 minute featurette about, well, the film and its characters. The interviews are not presented full screen, but in small windows while animated lines form boxes on screen. Hmmmm. Moran casts Malry here in a surprisingly negative light.

Novel to screen is a three-and-a-half minute featurette consisting of interviews with writer Simon Bent, director Paul Tickell and lead actor Nick Moran in which they discuss the process of adapting Johnson's book for this film. The line/box style of the previous featurette is reproduced here.

Soundtrack runs six minutes forty-nine seconds and discusses the creation of the music score, central to which is an interview with composer Luke Haines. As with the preceding featurettes, the presentation is a mixture of lines and boxes, but again the content is interesting.

What the papers said is a collection of carefully selected short extracts from favourable reviews of the film. A somewhat odd and rather insecure inclusion, as by the time you get to this you will already have formed your own opinion of the film, and one sentence is hardly going to make you consider it in a different light.

Interview with Paul Tickell is a textual extra in which the director is interviewed by Richard Marshall of 3 A.M. Magazine and discusses his approach to the film, dismissing the idea of shooting dogme-style because he'd already been down that path with his previous film Crush Proof and because "every fucker does it." He also has some interesting thoughts on British cinema in general and those working in it. There are quite a few pages to this and it makes for a worthwhile read.

Finally Alternative opening sequence is just that, lasting for two minutes and really making the 4:3 cropped picture of the main feature smart by being non-anamorphic 2.35:1. There is no sound on this sequence.

Several years ago, when a misguided attempt was made to revive the old TV music review show Juke Box Jury, Siouxsie of Siouxsie and the Banshees was asked to pass comment on an innofensive but somewhat banal track and memorably complained that: "It's not dangerous, and so it is." This nicely sums up a depressingly high percentage of recent British cinema. Entertainment can be pleasant, sure, but art, great art, should be dangerous. Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry may, thanks to some clunky moments and some misjudged wanderings from the source novel, fall some way short of being great cinema, but it is technically very accomplished, imaginative and bold. And yes, in a time when viewpoints are narrowing and terrorist paranoia is rife, it is dangerous. And that is something to celebrate.

As for the DVD, well the film deserves better. At a time when anamorphic widescreen transfers are almost a given, what the hell are we doing with this 4:3 cropped print? The extras are rather good, but even here there are signs of shoddiness. But with the film still struggling to find a large audience, a re-release is unlikely, and it can be picked up very cheaply. So check it out – flawed Outsider Cinema is still a damned sight better than most of the more polished mainstream fare out there.