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Gaz and Dave are young, unemployed steelwelders in Sheffield. Gaz needs money to retain joint custody of his son Nathan; Dave's loss of self-respect is making him fat and impotent. When the male stripping group The Chippendales visit the city, Gaz, Dave and a reluctant Nathan gatecrash. The sight of the strippers, cheered on by hysterical women, and the amount of money they make, impress Gaz.

Gaz and Dave foil fellow-steelworker Lomper's attempt to gas himself. The three men decide to persuade their former foreman, Gerald, an expert ballroom dancer who has not told his wife that he has been unemployed for six months, to help them form a strip act. Persuasion involves ruining Gerald's job interview by distracting him with a puppet-show battle using garden gnomes outside the window behind the interviewers' heads. Gerald agrees to coach the act. Reinforcements include an old black man named Mr Horse and Guy, a pretty and well-hung young man who can run up walls like Donald O'Connor in Singin' in the Rain. The group realise they have only one chance of drawing a lucrative crowd: to go "the full monty" and completely undress. But anxieties soon set in. Gerald is afraid of a "stiffy" onstage; Dave, worried he may never get it up again, backs out of the act. The dress rehearsal goes ahead, but a policeman stops by to investigate and Gaz, Gerald and Mr Horse are arrested for indecent exposure. Gerald returns home and his wife, incensed by his deception, throws him out. He then discovers that he has got the job, despite the sabotaged interview. When Dave's wife Jean finds red leather knickers in his drawer, he is forced to confess that he is a failed stripper. Her love restores his confidence and the group's sixth member. The publicity from the police arrest boosts ticket sales. On the big night, Gaz crumbles, claiming he can't go on. Nathan's dressing-down forces him onstage, where the six finally bare all to the crowd's roar of approval.

Unemployment may be no joke, but The Full Monty's rich, consistent humour derives from showing that losers who make their own luck do indeed have the last laugh. Peter Cattaneo (director of the BBC drama Loved Up) takes the British tradition that includes Trainspotting and Brassed Off to its logical conclusion: the requisite group of male friends (ex-steelworkers) are stripped physically as well as emotionally. Gaz, Dave, Lomper and Co. have an excess of free time and an absence of funds or future, all of which force them to look more closely at themselves. They discover the truism of humour - laugh at yourself and the whole world laughs with you - and take it one step further: expose yourself on stage and the whole world will pay to laugh at you.

In a sense, this is a coming-of-age film. Unemployment is shown as an emasculating, claustrophobic but above all childlike state. The job centre is identical to a classroom, with the slouching, rebellious men resembling reluctant schoolboys. (They contrast with Gaz's son Nathan, who maturely rejects his father's usually illegal and always irresponsible ideas of 'fun', such as gatecrashing football matches or forming a Chippendales of the North.) These man-children spend a lot of time sitting awkwardly on swings or in playrooms. Everywhere has become a playground for them: the strippers' rehearsals in a disused steel plant are incongruous and very funny, but serve to highlight that they no longer have any place in which to be grown-ups.

Women, here mostly wives and mothers or a leering mob, are very much secondary characters. Yet the way The Full Monty reverses the gender roles is startlingly effective: women piss standing up and men strip for money. These women have power over men's self-image, but they are easily fooled by costumes of various kinds: Gerald's suit blinds his wife to his unemployment. Lomper and Dave are both insecure security guards, with macho costumes that disguise the former's homosexuality and the latter's impotence. When police disrupt the dress rehearsal, Lomper and Guy (a dim boy with a large penis) flee, snatching negligees from a washing line to cover themselves. In a superbly understated scene, the two silk-clad men discover that they are in love with each other. Because clothes don't make the man, these boys strip so that their women - or their men - will see them properly. It is no coincidence that the strippers' swiftly removed costumes in the grand finale are police uniforms.

The men's vulnerability supplies the film with an odd, aching humour which complements the uproariousness of the strip scenes. Dave, Gaz and Lomper sitting on a hill discussing suicide is funny-sad soul-baring, last of the Summer Wine by way of Gregory's Girl. But there is also a less comic undertone -the wide green vistas with Sheffield in the distance contrast with the claustrophobic homes, closed-down shops and deserted steel plants. Laughter at pain can be beneficial or harmful here. The power-laden scenario of Gerald's job interview, where Gaz stages a puppet show with Gerald's garden gnomes in an attempt to win him over to the strippers' cause, is sharpened but also made humorous by the Punch-and-Judy sadism of gnome battering gnome, Gaz outside battering Gerald's social symbols while the interviewers before him batter his pride.

In some ways, The Full Monty is about group therapy, in both visual and narrative terms. Conversation, admission of need and collective action provide the only solutions to these men's situation. Talking, training, attending funerals or stripping, they are framed and filmed as a cohesive (if volatile) unit. The group's ability to turn weakness into strength by stripping off all the layers provides the redemptive finale so essential to any feel-good film. The posters advertise the act as "Hot Metal' (subtitle: "We dare to be bare!") and The Full Monty's final message is that these men are not the scrap which they initially feel themselves to be, but hot and malleable material indeed. By using their unwanted skills to weld themselves into a unit, these six unattractive anti-heroes succeed in reinforcing their self-esteem. When Gaz first tries stripping - in car headlights, cigarette in mouth, to the strains of Hot Chocolate's "You Sexy Thing' - the audience laughs at him, not with him. By the final, euphoric scene, complete with Top of the Pops-style zooms and cheers, the characters have gained acceptance on their own terms.

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