WHEN LOVE ISN'T ENOUGH

By RICHARD CORLISS

Boys Town is not the movie to see for the inside view on child- welfare problems. Ladybird, Ladybird is. This English drama about a worst-case child-custody scenario may show those who make social policy how hard it is to legislate love, lust, neglect, despair and other real-family values. Ken Loach's film, written by Rona Munro and based on a true story, horrifies and edifies in equal measure.

Maggie Conlon (Crissy Rock) is a working-class mess. She has had four children by four men. She tries her best to take care of the kids, but she has also lived with a man who beat her in front of them. (``He never, ever touched the kids,'' she says defensively. ``You gotta give him that.'') Once, when she and her brood were staying in a welfare hotel, she locked them inside the flat and went to a pub; there was a fire, and the children were injured. Social Services removed them to foster homes.

Maggie catches a break when she meets Jorge (Vladimir Vega), a gentle Paraguayan refugee. But as they try to create their own family, Maggie's past haunts them. So does her bad temper. Brutalized as a child, she has a vicious streak and a suspicion of Jorge's goodness. Any man who doesn't strike her--and strike out at the system she believes oppresses her--well, he can't be a real man, can he? Heroically, Jorge endures Maggie's depressions, rages and physical abuse. All he can do is love her.

All Maggie can do for her children is love them--from a distance. Assuming that Jorge is another of Maggie's brutal mates, the welfare state abducts their first child from their home and their second child straight from the maternity ward. By now Maggie is afraid to let her babies out of her sight, or even out of her body. ``No!'' she screams as she goes through labor. ``It's stayin' where it is!''

Ladybird, Ladybird opens one naked wound of the welfare dilemma. Should a loving mother be allowed to raise her children? But of course. And what if she is unable to protect them from her crippling weaknesses? Motherhood is a craft as well as a passion; it requires competence, ingenuity, common sense. ``Children need more than love,'' a welfare worker testifies at one of Maggie's humiliating hearings. ``They need support, and they need stability.'' In other words, the parent can't also be a child.

A social tract, however, can also be a movie. Ladybird, Ladybird is a good one--more painful to watch than any slasher film, because its emotional violence literally hits home. And however close Jorge comes to being fitted for the halo worn in Boys Town by Spencer Tracy's Father Flanagan, the new film rarely sentimentalizes its scorching situations.

That is due largely to Rock's fine ferocity. A Liverpool club comic who never acted before, but who has survived an abusive marriage, Rock asks for no quarter and gives none. Here is a mother, she says, dishing it out and taking it. Now you decide what to do with Maggie, and the millions of women like her, in England, America and around the world.