Yardie ***
Dir: Idris Elba. With: Aml Ameen, Shantol Jackson, Stephen
Graham, Naomi Ackie. 101 mins. Cert: 15
For his directorial debut, Idris Elba has seized upon a book
regarded as practically a sacred text among Britain’s Jamaican community –
Victor Headley’s ferocious 1992 pageturner about an angry young Kingstonian’s
progress through early Eighties Hackney – and strived to reshape it into
broadly accessible social history. Yardie
the film has ambition, confidence and energy, not to mention the novelty of
being a rare homegrown period drama that isn’t beholden to pallid Downtonisms, yet
it often finds itself standing, like Aml Ameen’s conflicted protagonist D, at a
crossroads. Ahead, its own distinctive, rewarding path; on all other sides,
several hundred yards of crime-movie cliché. At most of these junctures, Elba
makes the right move.
Its flaw is to put so much into play that it should feel
tempted by such short cuts. In this telling, D’s journey is at once immigrant song,
a drama of domestic reconnection, and a hopeful parable of inner-city healing;
Idris the DJ also can’t resist reflecting the dawn of UK sound-system culture,
allowing him to gild his soundtrack with especially choice Island cuts. He
wobbles, however, whenever we descend into the sickly-green lair of D’s
drug-dealing nemesis Rico (Stephen Graham), who spends his days getting
conspicuously high on his own supply and generally coming on like the Scarface
of the Kingsland Road. Not even Graham, one of our finest character actors, can
rescue these scenes from seeming somewhat stock.
Elsewhere, matters are steadied by Elba’s precision – in everything from the patois to the quiet excellence of Damien Creagh’s production design – and those smart choices made in casting. Ameen, upright and alert, has striking moments when he drops the swagger to reveal the wounded child beneath; Shantol Jackson is a fierce presence as D’s wife Yvonne. What’s around them loses a little snap late on as its antihero processes the trauma he’s both suffered and occasioned: you await the gutpunch Shane Meadows landed in This is England, and instead witness some of the force being smoothed away. A debut of unarguable promise, though – plenty to build on if Elba can himself resist the adolescent lure of running round with 007’s PPK.
Yardie opens in cinemas nationwide tomorrow.
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