Harris Dickinson makes a terrifically impressive debut here as a writer-director with this smart and compassionate picture about homelessness. It is engaging, sympathetically acted and layered with genuinely funny moments, mysterious and hallucinatory set-pieces, and challenges the notion of the haves who fear the contagious risk of coming into contact with the have-nots.
Frank Dillane is Mike, a guy who has spent five years living on the streets in London: begging, stealing, eating at charity food trucks. Dillane’s performance shows Mike’s nervy, twitchy, livewire mannerisms have been cultivated over what feels like a lifetime of abandonment: he has a kind of suppressed pleading quality as he asks passersby for the spare change that fewer people carry in these post-Covid times. His open smile has a learned survivalist determination, but what he has is not exactly charm. He is slippery and unreliable, but also intelligent and heartbreakingly vulnerable.
His one non-friend on the street is Nathan (played in cameo by Dickinson) who steals Mike’s money. In response Mike commits a despicable act of theft and violence for which he is entirely unrepentant and which leads to a prison sentence – but also a hostel place, a hotel kitchen job and a period of sobriety on release. It seems as if he is turning his life around, dreamily lost in his meditation tapes and even buying a little present for his probation supervisor – to whom he also confides his plans to start a luxury chauffeur business.
But, very disturbingly, it seems possible that what undermines Mike’s fresh start is his restorative justice session with his victim, an encounter which is supposed to be healing and cathartic but which Mike has no idea how to approach. Dickinson shows that he simply doesn’t understand the new register of emotional intelligence now expected of him. Amusingly he objects to the session convener’s breathy, patronising voice and singularly fails to apologise.
But he clearly is, at some level, aware that he has failed a test, failed at being a good person. His job at the hotel kitchen goes south and his new job picking up litter is uncertain. This despite a new relationship with a woman working alongside him (a smart performance from Megan Northam) who is much closer to sorting her life out than he is. Mike has good mates but one of them offers him some ketamine and things spiral inevitably downwards from there. Did drug addiction mean things were always hopeless, whatever resources Mike’s personality might have offered? The film does not offer easy answers or answers of any sort.
When it looked as if Mike was on the way up he avoided his old acquaintances, when he sees the appalling Nathan in a charity shop, he scurries out. The old ways were contagious. His old life was contagion. Did the restorative justice session, which confronted him with evidence of his selfish aggression, trigger only resentment? And all the time he is plagued with memories of a reproachful woman (his mother?) and a huge mossy cave (some fantasy? Childhood holiday?) These are the visions of a complex past and a compromised future.
• Urchin screened at the Cannes film festival.
