Streetlife: "Urchin"

In his directorial debut Urchin, the actor Harris Dickinson hands a contemporary a prime opportunity to inhabit a character for 100 minutes. The contemporary is Frank (son of Stephen) Dillane, a dishevelled cherub: part young Pete Doherty, part young Gary Lineker. The character is one Mike, a young homeless man adrift on the streets of London. At his sharpest, Mike is methodical as a means of keeping what little he has left together: you see it in the way he unrolls his sleeping bag for the night, or takes notes upon gaining entry to a halfway house. He has intelligence and ambition, announcing vague plans to operate his own chauffeuring business someday; he's not entirely woebegone, which gives us hope. Almost as compelling is the society the film begins to describe. If there's one director Dickinson has taken particular notes from over this opening stretch of his acting career, it's that sometime sociologist Ruben Östlund. Dickinson here redirects the observational realism of Östlund's early films, applying it not to score cheap points or easy laughs, but instead to plug his actors into authentic-seeming situations; that task achieved, he then starts to ask questions both of the society that allows its most vulnerable to descend to this level, and of the citizens who walk on by, ignoring Mike's pleas for help. Urchin isn't a documentary, rather a fiction inspired by its director's work with the dispossessed; even so, there are stretches, particularly early on, where you could be forgiven for thinking it was.

As a screenwriter, Dickinson wards off any piousness or sentimentality with a policy of (sometimes blunt) honesty. The film is nothing if not upfront about Mike's capacity for aggression: the title card has barely appeared when we witness him assaulting a good Samaritan so as to swipe his watch and wallet. Even if we're not immediately repelled, even if we rationalise this act of violence as that of a desperate man, we're then left in the company of a character who presents as something of an oddity, his hair untended and shaggy, his walk defensive and scampering, his musty harlequin wardrobe sourced either from bins or charity shops. Dickinson tosses in a curious erectile dysfunction anecdote, and curates one strangely memorable image: Mike walking along a street clutching a potted baby cactus, only just pricklier than its bearer. He's not woebegone, but he is a little on the eccentric side; faced with such a restless and unpredictable presence, you can well understand why some of his fellow humans choose to look the other way or cross the road entirely. Yet this struck me as a deeply empathetic move on Dickinson's part: the protagonist here isn't the waifish innocent the mind conjures upon exposure to, say, Phil Collins' "Another Day in Paradise", but a fellow unravelling at the seams, someone who risks confounding, exasperating or appalling those of us lucky enough to have roofs over our heads. Dickinson approaches Mike much as Agnes Varda shot the Sandrine Bonnaire character in Vagabond - sympathetically, but not flatteringly - while noting in passing that Mike is really no more eccentric than some of the guests at the hotel where he lands kitchen work. The boundary separating polite society from dereliction of some kind can be that thin and porous.

Urchin, too, moves (sometimes staggers) in strange ways. It's at its boldest in its rejection of neat, linear recovery arcs: there are no straight lines here, and the process of reassimilation is shown to be haphazard at best. Even sober, Mike takes one step forwards, then two steps back, followed by a sudden lurch sideways. All this shuffling does, however, throw up niggling, valuable, sometimes provocative truths. Mike seems consumed by a shame that relates to his past, tearing up amid a reconciliation exercise with the victim of his assault, and then again during a dance performance he stumbles into while high on ketamine. Dickinson takes great care to give the character an inner life, repeatedly cutting away to cave-like interiors that appear to represent both an escape from the urban environment and a pictorialisation of Mike's gnawing solitude. Urchin remains small in scope, scratching around in the margins and turning up sometimes actorly scenes of conflict and conversation; it's also guilty of deploying what's become a British arthouse trope, co-opting a popular hit (Atomic Kitten's "Whole Again") for the purposes of pseudo-profundity. (I can understand why: here's something easily stitched into the trailer for what might otherwise be a hard sell, a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down.) What expands is Dillane's central performance: Mike gets only more complex, more knotty, more troubling, moving beyond the consolations of pat psychology. (By the finale, he's broken clear of earthly concerns and can be observed floating in space, a universe in himself - or perhaps a black hole.) Hollywood would prescribe this boy a stock course of treatments to be ticked off in order; Dickinson recognises Mike as an individual who really needs individualised care and supervision. Such idiosyncrasies bode well for this hyphenate filmmaker's future: Urchin is what would have been called an intriguing debut in the days before everything had to be heralded as a major four- or five-star breakthrough.

Urchin is now showing in selected cinemas.