A very dark and challenging film with a ridiculous title

The recent (2013) British indie film about two boys who steal copper wire has only one thing seriously wrong with it: the ridiculous title, The Selfish Giant, which would make anyone think this is an animated children's cartoon or something like that and in fact it's nothing like that at all - it is one of the darkest, most challenging films of recent years and a very sad and powerful look at extreme poverty and abuse in the north of England: "council" housing, families crowded into tight quarters, constant yelling at one another, fathers either absent or drunken abusers (verbal, not physical), few or no effective social services, no way out. The two boys are best friends and polar opposites, one a feisty and hyperkinetic kid constantly in trouble and the other a sweet and sensitive overweight kid, subject of bullying. Both boys get expelled from school and take on life on their own, thinking they can steal copper cable and sell to a scrap dealer and get enough $ to get their family lives back in order, to a degree. The scrap dealer takes advantage of them in all sorts of ways, and the two kids getting deeper into trouble and way over their heads, and nobody seems to know or care about them in the least. Some truly powerful scenes - all of the family outbursts in the tiny apartments, the illegal horse race on some sort of abandoned track, to name two - also some beautiful photography of English landscape scarred by industrial waste and huge concrete cooling towers. The film reminded me a little of Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner from two generations ago - similar themes and mood, though - and the other very dark, troubling, engaging films from the Scottish director - Andrea Arnold (Red Road, Fish Tank). I will warn about the language, though - it's even more impenetrable than some of the gang-talk in The Wire; I could honestly understand only about half of what the characters say, like watching a foreign film w/out subtitles - but that said you can very well follow the story without catching every line of dialog and the impenetrable nature of the dialog actually adds to the mood: the kids and their families are isolated from their culture by the very nature of their language; in England much more than in the U.S., accent and regional dialect are still huge determinants of class.