Into the valley: "Shed Your Tears and Walk Away"

Hebden Bridge: a picturesque Yorkshire village "invaded", according to a Half Man Half Biscuit lyric, by "the chattering classes". Shed Your Tears and Walk Away, a desperately sad documentary from Jez Lewis, a collaborator with Nick Broomfield on 2008's Ghosts, reveals the location as something else entirely: "a drug town with a tourist problem", as one of the more intoxicated contributors has it.

It's also the site of a painful homecoming for the director, who was raised in Hebden, and has found himself returning to attend the funerals of many friends and acquaintances. Lewis finds his surviving schoolmates in the park, clutching (clutching to?) disability permits and cans of Special Brew. Here is Graham "Cass" Cassidy, a cuddly sort who falls somewhere between Shaun Ryder and Frank Gallagher from Shameless in looks and is wrestling, constantly and painfully, with alcoholism; next to him, Michael "Silly" Silcock, once a keen sportsman and putative Foreign Legionnaire, now a Mark E. Smith-alike who mixes yeasty foulmouthery with moments of savage clarity and sensitivity. Both men look older than they actually are; both, we come to conclude, are lucky to have made it this far.

For Hebden has been blighted by drink and drugs in recent years, and a spate of suicides among its youngest constituents. Dying young has become not just a way of life, but a logical consequence; what Lewis's film shows us is the enforced immaturity faced by the area's poorer residents. With few jobs available, surrounded by luxury apartments they'll never be able to afford, an entire generation has been obliged to live at home with the tattered remnants of their families. Parents seem reluctant to let their offspring fly the nest because there's nowt beyond it, save perhaps a momentary high, followed by a swift (and usually fatal) fall to earth. Lewis's friends hang out at the park because that's presumably where they went as children: it now resembles terrestrial purgatory in a place that offers tea shops and graveyards, with nothing much in between the two.

This could be Therouvian territory - Louis, not Marcel - were the filmmaking not so utterly raw and personal. Lewis - not Louis - tries to keep himself behind the camera, but he (like any viewer) can't help but feel the need to intervene: a hug here, a consoling pat on the shoulder or comforting phone call there. He uses the camera not as a way of keeping his distance, but to connect himself to his past, and his audience to a stratum of society that they might not have encountered (or might prefer to look away from); finally, as a way of keeping his remaining friends alive. (It's a typical stratagem that Lewis should himself turn up at the park, camera in hand, to ensure Cass checks himself into rehab, and typical of Cass that he should drink every mile of the way there.)

Shed Your Tears nonetheless locates telling contrasts and ironies amid the bleakness. You chuckle as Silly and Cass's stepson set about a municipal tennis court - to the strains of the BBC's Wimbledon theme - while the town's elders, engaged in the altogether more genteel pursuit of crown green bowls, look on. And you shiver as the great natural beauty surrounding Hebden gives way to the scary absence of reasons to live in these parts, the hate and regret lurking in the back of these individuals' hearts, the sheer cosmic bad luck dogging the area. (The most traumatic passing the film notes appears to have nothing to do with drink or drugs: just a bright, vivacious young woman killed when her house went up in smoke. Just how much misfortune can one community bear before its residents elect to go for one final walk in the woods?)

Lewis, for his part, retains his sobriety throughout, displaying an eye for evocative, suggestive detail: the slapdash wiring in Cass's family home, say, or the boxes of cigarettes piled up on his mother's sideboard. This could be Bridgend, or any other provincial town where the gap between the haves and the have-nots - those the universe permits to make a life for themselves, and those it doesn't - has become too great, swallowing the weak and the vulnerable whole. Shed Your Tears is undeniably bleak - I couldn't blame you, in this instance, if you chose to walk on by - and Lewis can't, finally, give us the closure both we and his friends and subjects so badly need, but he keeps the film honest and, above all else, humane. Here but for the grace of God, and a just society, goes every last one of us.

Shed Your Tears and Walk Away opens at the ICA this weekend, then tours selected cinemas across the country from July.