The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner is a 1962 British coming-of-age film directed by Tony Richardson, one of the new young directors emerging from the English Stage Company at the Royal Court.

The screenplay was written by Alan Sillitoe, based on his 1959 short story of the same title, and concerns a rebellious youth who has been sentenced to a borstal for burgling a bakery.

He gains privileges in the institution through his prowess as a long-distance runner, but reveries of important events before his incarceration that he has during his solitary runs lead him to re-evaluate his status as the prize athlete of the Governor.

They are being taken to a borstal (a detention center for juvenile offenders) named Ruxton Towers, where the inmates live in a series of Nissen huts with no privacy.

A former runner himself, the Governor takes Colin under his wing, promoting him from dismantling scrap to performing light gardening work, and eventually giving him the freedom to do solo practice runs outside the barbed-wire fences.

The jobless Colin indulged in petty crime with his best friend, Mike, while, at home, his father's long years of toil in a local factory resulted in a terminal illness.

Colin eventually overtakes Gunthorpe and gains a comfortable lead, but, as he nears the finish line, the imagery that has been flashing through his mind becomes progressively jarring.

[4] Alan Sillitoe was part of the group of writers labeled the "angry young men", who produced media depicting the plight of rebellious youth.

The "them" and "us" notions that Richardson stresses reflect the basis of British society at the time, and Redgrave's "proper gentleman" of a Governor is in stark contrast to many of the young working-class inmates.

Sillitoe's screenplay can be interpreted as either tragic or bathetic by ultimately projecting the protagonist as a working class rebel, rather than an otherwise rehabilitated, but conformist talent.