One day Joe and Les pull the body of a young woman, Cathie Dimly, naked except for a petticoat, from the water.

Via flashbacks, we learn Joe knew her, and scenes involving his relationship with Cathie are juxtaposed with those set in the present time.

Joe begins to suffer from chronic writer's block and Cathie, unhappy with his lack of productivity, accuses him of taking advantage of her.

Eventually, Ella's desire to settle in the suburbs and her no-nonsense supervision of the barge's daily commercial activities put a dampener on the unbridled passion in her relationship with Joe, and he packs and leaves.

She reveals she is two months pregnant with his child, and when Joe nonchalantly begins to walk away, she runs after him, trips, and falls into the water while dressed only in her petticoat.

Daniel Gordon, a plumber whom Cathie was casually seeing, is arrested and tried for her murder, and Joe spends a few days in the courtroom listening to testimony.

The film was shot on location in Gullane in East Lothian, along the Union Canals from Edinburgh to Falkirk,[3][4] on the Forth and Clyde and in Clydebank, Dumbarton, Renton in West Dunbartonshire, Grangemouth and Perth and Kinross.

[2] When the film was released in the United States, the Motion Picture Association of America rated it NC-17 for "some explicit sexual content," notably a 14-second scene depicting oral sex.

The naturalistic acting has considerable power, with Tilda Swinton giving a characteristically unself-regarding performance and Ewan McGregor steering clear of easy charm.

The narrative scheme, the brooding period atmosphere, the understated score (by David Byrne) and the precision of the acting also make the story seem more interesting than it is.

In the end, Joe's sexuality, while exhibited with quite a bit more explicitness than the old movies would permit, is also what makes Young Adam feel most dated.

The film follows the novel (and many others like it) in assuming, rather than proving, that its hero's selfishness and failure offer clues to the human condition, rather than evidence of individual limitation.

These changes compromise the adaptation but generally improve the story since Trocchi's existentialism has neither the heft of Jean-Paul Sartre nor the pulp pleasures of James M. Cain.

Whichever the case, he has greatly tempered the story's brutality the old-fashioned way: He puts an appealing, sympathetic star at the center and surrounds him with beautiful visuals, with a darkly contrasting color palette of bruising black and blue.

"[14] Derek Elley of Variety called the film "strongly cast" and "a resonant, beautifully modulated relationships drama" that "establishes Mackenzie as an accessible stylist within mid-range [contemporary] British cinema.

[16] The Director's Guild of Great Britain nominated Mackenzie for the DGGB Award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in British Film.