China’s scale is as imposing as it is surprising. Most Westerners won’t have heard of the city of Chengdu, never mind be able to place it on a map. And yet it’s massive – home to a population about two times greater than that of London’s. Understanding China can sometimes feel like an exercise in wrapping your head around large numbers, though what often gets lost in the appreciation of the country’s size is the granular detail of its citizens’ everyday lives. A recently released fly on the wall documentary called The Last Year of Darkness zooms right in on these lives, examining Chengdu’s queer underground club scene and the characters who inhabit it. The film manages to capture and bottle the angst of a generation of Chinese 20-somethings caught in the crossfire of tradition and self-expression, granting you a window into an oft-misunderstood country at a decisive crossroads in its history.

With an opening montage that channels Gaspar Noe in its neon intensity, throughout the film you pinch yourself that this is a work of non-fiction and not some highly stylised drama. The characters feel so real, yet that’s precisely because they are so. There’s Yihao, a vagabond drag performer who you can’t help but admire for daring to be different; there’s Kimberley, a depressive whose rift with her boyfriend grows steadily under the glare of the cameras; and there’s a Russian DJ who, when he isn’t rapidly flicking through his record collection, can be found rapidly flicking through hookup options on dating apps with not one, but two smartphones.

With plenty more misfits and night owls besides, there are a rotation of other nocturnal characters who you meet over a cigarette or out on the street, throwing up and goofing around. Each of them allow filmmaker Ben Mullinkosson considerable intrusion into their inner lives, and in turn we get front row seats into the romantic scuffles and emotional breakdowns which are the intoxicated bedfellows of these hedonistic nights.

The favourite haunt of these clubgoers is Funky Town, a bass-filled sanctuary where they come to mingle and be themselves. Yihao gets dressed up in drag, and defiantly struts his stuff across town as he makes his way to the bar, receiving cat calls, serving confidence. There he meets our Russian DJ friend, who kindly turns down his drunken attempts at flirting. Cigarettes are chain smoked and drinks are knocked back with abandon, and the frenetic BPM inside is matched by the fast-changing world outside, where construction work continues apace, building buildings, and tunnelling for infrastructure under the concrete. A new site crops up next to Funky Town, and you are left to worry about how much longer this queer community can endure as a hold-out against China’s unstoppable economic march.

We are invited to share in other parts of the protagonists’ lives too, away from the techno and the booze: their day (or night) jobs, therapy sessions, hospital visits, family dinners. You get a strong sense of the pressures weighing down on these young folk and what drives them to find belonging and escape at Funky Town. You also come to grips with the challenges of living in modern Chinese society: the high expectations of family, insecure work and lack of opportunity, alienation, social stigma, loneliness, a feeling of smallness. The stories are tragic and raw; Yihao feels like an outsider in his own family, and sadly contracts HIV/AIDS later in the film, while Kimberley is let down by her emotionally distant boyfriend, heaping fresh pain on her ongoing battle with mental illness and basic desire to belong somewhere. These sad tales are punctuated by moments of genuine love and crisis, moments (here’s looking at you, post-club rooftop sunrise scene) which feel so poignant they ascend into fiction.

The pocket of freedom that is Funky Town feels so brazenly at odds with its surroundings, but is it? We are drip-fed a narrative of China’s crushing cultural conformity, and mistruths such as their supposed ‘social credit system’ stick in the Western mind. We need more films like The Last Year of Darkness; not because they show the full picture, but because they show us another side to China we can be led into believing isn’t there.

As the final night out of the film begins in haste, Yihao has a tender moment of vulnerability as he puts on his make-up, claiming that he doesn’t know why he does drag, and that he hates seeing himself as a girl. And yet the smile on his face when he performs is a powerful refutation of his emotionally-charged attempts to renounce who he really is. Personalities like Yihao will always stand out, it’s just in their nature. When it looks as though he will throw in the towel on the night, he rouses himself in the taxi with a live rendition of Bowie’s Starman, which leaps from his phone speakers to soundtrack the film’s glorious crescendo.

Finishing the film, you’re left to wonder where China sits, comparatively, in its economic and cultural development. Is it 70s Britain, where Bowie’s appearance on Top of the Pops was so shocking to the sensibilities of the British public of the time it’s widely considered an era-defining performance all these decades later? Or is it 90s Fight Club America perhaps, gripped by cynicism borne out of a realisation that consumer capitalism isn’t all it’s cracked out to be? Or has it leapfrogged us entirely into the future, with its gleaming subway trains burrowing under their cities and cyberpunk aesthetic above ground? It may just be all these things. All at once.

Words by Charlie Forbes