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Instead we see a charming, cocksure character, who is frequently smiling and firing off one-liners.

Scriptwriter says the heart of the film is a "love triangle" between Clough, assistant Peter Taylor and his predecessor at Leeds, .

is excellent as the curmudgeonly Revie, the antithesis of his young, charismatic rival.

Although Clough had much in common with Revie, having also been born in Middlesbrough and capped for England, he harboured an almost irrational hatred of his adversary.

It all stemmed, apparently, from Revie's refusal to shake his hand when the all-conquering Leeds had visited Clough's Derby in 1968.

This lingering hatred seemed to persuade Clough to take the Leeds job in the first place.

He wanted to emulate Revie by winning the Championship, only he would do it better, by playing attractive, clean football.

The marriage was doomed from the start. When we see Clough first arriving at Elland Road, he delivers the infamous "chuck all your medals and all your caps and all your pots and all your pans into the biggest dustbin you can find, because you've never won any of them fairly", speech to a disbelieving group of players.

Although the dominant voices in that team - Billy Bremner, Norman Hunter and Johnny Giles - were very prominent characters in Peace's book, they are reduced to caricatures here.

We never hear their side of the story and little is revealed about their part in Clough's downfall.

This is partly deliberate, because of the controversy Peace caused in the way he depicted the "plotting" trio in his novel.

Indeed .

The result here is that they are reduced to two-dimensional, bit-part characters.

Clough's biggest mistake at Leeds came before he even arrived, when he agreed to take the job on his own, without .

Taylor was a tactical mastermind and an unparalleled scouter of talent. He was, by his own admission, "the goods at the back", while Clough was the "shop window".

Although the squat Timothy Spall bears little resemblance to the tall Taylor, he delivers a characteristically compelling performance.

Taylor would have probably followed Clough to Leeds were it not for a huge falling out between the duo in Majorca.

It makes a memorable scene in the film, the camera panning out to show the two increasingly distant figures walking moving further and further apart on a sun-drenched jetty.

They are reunited in a genuinely funny and moving scene, in which Clough travels down to Brighton to literally beg Taylor to work with him again.

These scenes almost certainly didn't happen, which seems to have been exercising some people.

There are several other examples of "poetic licence" in the film, such as Clough putting out oranges and ashtrays in the Leeds dressing room and hiding in the bowels of the Baseball Ground during a match.

This has again attracted criticism, which seems to miss the point a little bit. These incidents may not have happened, but they perfectly fit the dramatic representation here.

And are any films based on real events 100% accurate?

The football action in the film is undeniably unrealistic though and the actors, particularly Stephen Graham, who plays the legendary Bremner, don't look like footballers.

Director Tom Hooper partly alleviates this problem by using archive footage of matches.

Where the film is far more successful is at tapping into the current nostalgia for the 1970s.

So we see Clough driving along while swigging from a can of lager and players enjoying mugs of tea rather than isotonic drinks at the end of matches.

It all adds to a very watchable, entertaining film, but not one that tries to explore the complexities of a controversial character.