Solomon (Kashif O’Connor) says in the opening words of Warhol: “David, you are a good man”. Dave Dawson (Corey Johnson) replies: “If that gets out, I’m screwed”. The latter has just given the homeless army veteran, encamped under Tower Bridge on a cold winter’s night, a bag of food. Throwing in a seasonal chocolate decoration, he adds gruffly, “Merry fucking Christmas.”

The question of Dave’s ethical makeup is key to writer/director Adam Ethan Crow’s film. If this exchange between black British Solomon and white American Dave bridges a divide of class, race and provenance, then that is in fact Dave’s specialty, as a talkback radio DJ who reaches out to hear from anyone who has something to say, and to turn their opinions and stories into entertainment for an anonymous but expanding audience. Like Grant Mazzy from Bruce McDonald’s Pontypool (2008), Dave is both a shock jock and under something of a cloud, persona non grata in the US for taking his verbal disquisitions too far in a much higher-profile ‘celebrity’ radio gig there, and relegated to London where he is, as his station manager (and qualified fan) Jack Ratoran (Gethin Anthony) puts it, “playing the graveyard shift on the UK’s 28th rated station.”

Dave may be a good man, but he has a bad boy image to uphold – and while both Jack and the show’s producer Marla (Sian Altman) know that there is a line to be measured in broadcasting standards, Dave keeps crossing it. This leads to pressure from the station’s owner and its board members to rein this ‘filth pedlar’ in. That is, until they see the listener figures start to soar. Even in his 2am-4am slot, Dave is good for business, and he knows just how to push his willing callers into collaborating with him in quality radio.

Dave is also mercurial, and very hard to pin down. In one call, he goes from ferociously attacking a woman’s weakness in still wanting to be with the man who has both cheated on and dumped her, to sharing with her a tender, intimately personal account of his own lasting struggles after his partner left him in the lurch. And while his words eventually seem kind, even empathetic, towards the caller whom he initially, cruelly ridiculed, we learn shortly afterwards that he is really addressing his once-straying wife who he knows is listening, and that he himself is far from faithful in his own erotic affairs (including with fellow DJ Angela, played by Aislinn De’Ath). So ‘dangerous’ Dave is a mess of contradictions: nihilistic yet needy, but most of all a devastating wielder of the spoken word in any cause, he is all at once a contrarian who, as Jack tells Marla, “always takes the opposite side of the fight”, and a free speech advocate who constantly cuts off his interlocutors. When Dave inevitably goes too far on air once again, this time with horrific real-world consequences, he might suddenly shift in our perceptions from good man to villain, but in the aftermath it is left to him alone – both the best and worst person for the job – to extract and articulate a broader moral lesson, and to pay a penalty that he himself imposes, even as his own story, playing out live on air, becomes as exploitable and exploited as everyone else’s.

Unfolding, like Oliver Stone’s Talk Radio (1988), in something like real time, and adapted from Crow’s own 2014 short, Warhol offsets its central studio drama with two subplots. In one, three strangers (Robert Dukes, Tianah Hodding, Anya Newall) compete to win a car by being the last to keep their hand on it in an outdoor endurance contest; and in the other, traumatised, philosophical Solomon tries to dissuade desperate young Nile (Araloyin Oshunremi) from breaking bad. All three of these stories deal in ethical questions, but most of all they are concerned with communication and connection. Crow uses late-night scenarios in order to explore what free speech might even mean in an online era of insta-celebrity, enforced argument and polarising partisanship. The hint is in the title, and spelt out in the film: now that, thanks to social media, we can all easily have our 15 minutes of fame, what productive use might we make of them? The suggested answer, though mixed, is dispiriting, as ‘dinosaur’ Dave becomes medium and message, vitiator and vector, of an intellectually and morally confused age. There is, somewhere between the lines of all this unsettling dialectic, a plea for us to think hard about the way in which we casually interact with each other, and the damage it can so easily do, when likes and ratings are allowed to trump higher values. In the end, Warhol is as slippery as Dave himself, simultaneously soulful and cynical. It is definitely a good film, and won’t be screwed if that gets out.

Warhol premieres at the 31st Raindance Film Festival.