What is it with Michael Sheen and famous people?His uncanny, chameleon-like ability to play celebs on screen has already seen him get inside the skin of Tony Blair (in The Deal and The Queen), Kenneth Williams (in Fantabulosa! and David Frost (in Frost/Nixon). Now, with The Damned United, he’s pulled off another eerily accurate impersonation of an iconic figure - football legend Brian Clough.Actually, what Sheen does goes much deeper than simple mimicry. Yes, he gets his characters’ mannerisms right, gets all the familiar verbal tics and physical foibles down pat, but he also gives viewers a sense of what is going on inside and exposes something revealing about these personalities - whether it’s the ruthlessness inside Blair’s slippery charm, Williams’ neurotic neediness, or Frost’s surprising combination of silkiness and grit.With Clough in The Damned United, what Sheen shows us is the insecurity that apparently lurked behind its subject’s notorious cockiness. The inner doubt of the man who famously said on Parkinson: “I certainly wouldn’t say I’m the best manager in the business, but I’m in the top one.”A desperate urge to prove himself is what drives ‘Old Big Head’ over the course of this tragi-comic biopic, which centres on Clough’s calamitous 44-day period in charge of reigning league champions Leeds United in 1974.Based on David (Red Riding) Peace’s much-praised novel and adapted by Peter Morgan (writer too, as it happens, of The Deal, The Queen and Frost/Nixon), the movie flashes back and forth between those doomed 44 days and the years leading up to them, during which Clough and his loyal assistant Peter Taylor (sympathetically played by Timothy Spall) had taken lowly Derby County into the top flight.In taking the post at Leeds in 1974, book and film assert, Clough is driven by a desire to outdo his predecessor in the job, Don Revie, who had made the club the dominant force in English football. By Clough’s reckoning, though, their achievements are tarnished by the