The slight and soft-eyed British actor Frank Dillane is in every scene of the London-set drama Urchin. That would put pressure on any performance, but it’s compounded by the approach taken by first-time writer-director Harris Dickinson which gives priority to Dillane’s physical presence – his itchy, jerky movement – at the expense of other tools for revealing character and generating interest. Dillane, who won two prizes at this year’s Cannes, is the main attraction.

At first the film resembles a slice-of-life but quickly becomes more focused and dramatic – not a portrayal of crunch-time, but a series of tightly connected incidents. Mike, an alcoholic and drug addict living on the streets, realises that his friend Nathan has stolen his wallet from an established hiding-place, and after asking passersby if they’ve seen a man with ‘blue trousers’ and ‘blood on his face’ (to no avail) tracks him down to the UCL campus in Stratford. The encounter attracts the attention of a well-dressed professional, Simon (Okezie Morro), whom Mike beats up and robs, landing him in prison. On his release, Mike is assigned a probation officer and finds a high-pressure kitchen job at a run-down hotel. For a while, there’s a fluidity, a sort of cyclical working through the permutations of Mike’s new routine – working in the kitchen, visiting the probation officer, listening to motivational tapes in his hostel bedroom. Then, after he loses the chef job, it’s Mike litter-picking in Potters Field Park, chatting with his colleague Andrea in her van, and back in the hostel bedroom. But Mike’s turbulent character soon jerks us back into the realm of more causal narrative logic.

Dickinson, who played central roles in Ruben Östlund’s Triangle of Sadness and Hanna Reijn’s Babygirl – and pops up here as Nathan – drew from his experience of odds jobs and volunteering for outreach programmes. The result is an addition to the genre of contemporary proletkino, which Emilie Bickerton, writing in NLR, described as portraying the ‘isolated individual, supported only by chance personal relationships’. But in other ways, Dickinson is setting out an alternative to proletkino tendencies, in particular the naturalist method of its leading British figure – a pioneer who remains pre-eminent – Ken Loach, who, in Bickerton’s description, uses ‘wide shots to establish and explain place and setting’, unobtrusive mise-en-scene and deploys ‘speech’ (including ‘long discussions’) as the best route to his goal of ‘understanding’. Dickinson, though an admirer of Loach’s work, is after something else, something simpler or more instinctual.

Urchin provides the viewer little in the way of analysis, whether individual or collective, psychological or sociological. The film displays a marked resistance to basic mooring details. We are largely deprived of much background and backdrop, beyond the London streets and parks. The hostel where Mike lives for most of the film receives no exterior shot. In a scene with his probation officer Nadia (Buckso Dhillon Woolley), Mike mentions that he was adopted, yet we don’t know who receives his free phone call following an arrest. Supporting characters make occasional references – intended to be cursory or wide of the mark – to ‘the government’ and ‘class’. Talking about the decision not to show Mike’s seven-month stint in prison, Dickinson has said, ‘I think we’ve seen enough of that in cinema’, before making the decisive addition, ‘in British cinema’.   

These omissions are understandable and largely welcome, but the viewer is also aware of what is being withheld or refused – in this case, the insight and dramatic intensity available to naturalist proletkino. Dickinson does make a few gestures towards a new framework or conceptual structure. The first thing we hear in Urchin is a Hackney street-preacher talking about Jesus. Mike is a man beset with challenges, an outcast, rejected by the mainstream, but the film doesn’t quite depict sacrifice or salvation, pilgrimage or temptation (beyond an offer of ketamine). Subliminal or dream images seem to imply that he’s something of an Adam figure, exiled, or out of place. But Dickinson is never mythologising or indulgent. Alan Lovell, reviewing Saturday Night and Sunday Morning in NLR, argued that whereas Alan Sillitoe, in his original novel, provoked sympathy by ‘playing down’ Arthur Seaton’s ‘destructive, anarchic side’, Karel Reisz’s film – from a Sillitoe script, with Albert Finney in the lead role – was devoted to showing its effect on other characters. Dickinson shifts effectively between these two impulses, Mike as victim and malefactor, sweetheart and brute, naif and fool.

For the most part, though, instead of ideas and ironies, Urchin pursues a formal or experiential agenda. Though the narrative approach is observational – we watch Mike beg, cook, shower, scurry about – the aesthetic owes less to cinema verité, the forerunner of British realism, than the thrusting French cinema of the 1980s, the later fictional work of Agnès Varda (Vagabond), and the practitioners of the postmodern movement derided as cinéma du look, Jean-Jacques Beineix (The Moon in the Gutter, Betty Blue) and Leos Carax, who mined the euphoria in precarious living conditions in Les Amants du Pont-Neuf (1991), briefly – though not by intention – the most expensive film ever made in France.

The expected prison sequence, for example, is elided in favour of a shot that follows the water from his first shower down the plughole and through the drain out into a vernal dreamscape. And then he’s free. It’s crucial to the film’s visual variety that for most of the story, Mike isn’t living on the street. In one scene, two young women who work in the hotel take him for a night of karaoke – the camera moves slowly towards him as they sing Atomic Kitten’s lyrics about becoming ‘whole again’ – then to an empty car park to perform wheelies in an old BMW and play with sparklers. The things Loach foreswears – ‘stylistic flourishes’, ‘nondiegetic music’ – are among Dickinson’s favoured devices. The Atomic Kitten song is initially diegetic – originating in the fictional world – but it continues playing after the karaoke scene is finished. There’s even a spot of slow-motion.

Urchin was shot on location last spring and early summer, and Dickinson and his crew were either picky or lucky: there’s pain in the film, even despair, but no rain. Cinematographer Josée Deshaies and production designer Anna Rhodes have created a buoyant palette, which extends to the burnt-sienna tiles in the shower at Mike’s hostel and the blue bibs he wears in his job in Potters Fields Park, itself a pleasing setting, with views of the Thames and Tower Bridge. The compositions are almost uniformly centred – four men seated in a row in the probation officer’s waiting room, five light fixtures in the hotel lobby. Whenever Mike is on screen alone, he is surrounded by space on both sides. If another character enters the frame, there’s often a bit of micro-choreography to restore the symmetry.

It’s a paradox of British cinema’s devotion to realism that an embrace of excess – usually deemed the medium’s reigning vice – amounts to an act of resistance or restraint. As long ago as 1961, Lovell was talking of the ‘anti-style’ displayed by Reisz. By now we could easily be in an age of anti-anti-anti-anti-anti style, and at the mercy of a mere see-saw logic. So it’s to Dickinson’s advantage that the post-war wave of directors – emerging from the Free Cinema documentary movement and dovetailing with the television play – exerted such an enduring hold on the representation of working-class or underclass experience, due in part to Loach’s longevity (he won his second Palme d’Or, for I, Daniel Blake, almost fifty years after Cathy Come Home aired on the BBC). And though Urchin is not the first British film on this subject to display a preference for extroversion or phantasmagorical flourish – one thinks of another debut, Nick Love’s Goodbye Charlie Bright (2000) – there’s no doubt it remains the path less trodden, offering sufficient possibilities for sensory frisson to make good the undoubted losses.

At various points, especially in its frenetic closing sequence, Urchin exhibits a transatlantic influence: the work of the New York-based Safdie brothers, who emerged in the late 2000s with the comedy Daddy Long Legs and made a more widespread impact with two sweaty thrillers about a man living by his wits, Good Time (2017) and Uncut Gems (2019). The younger brother, Benny, who is thirty-nine, has differentiated himself in recent years with memorable appearances as an actor in Good Time as well as Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza and Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, in both of which he played real-life figures. Now he has made his debut as a solo director with The Smashing Machine, in which Dwayne Johnson, a former wrestler, known as The Rock, and latterly the most commercially reliable Hollywood film star, plays Mark Kerr, an early figure in the mixed martial arts competition Ultimate Fighting Championship, or UFC. (Josh Safdie has also written and directed a film on a sporting subject, table tennis, Marty Supreme, which comes out at the end of the year.)

Part of the film’s intention, as with Urchin, is to dent a caricature, to show the gentleness of a character defined on the outside by addiction and acts of violence. In this regard, Safdie was confronted by the same problem as Dickinson – finding an alternative to an established mould, but in this case one coming not from a social-realist tradition but Hollywood genres, the biopic in particular. Mark Kerr is a historical figure (though not one known to the majority of the audience), eminent in his field, and at points an addict. It’s not so much that the material is, or seems to be, familiar as that it is associated with an obvious narrative arc – triumph over adversity, or rise, fall, rise. But while Kerr recovers from addiction, he doesn’t ascend to great heights, and Safdie is elsewhere intent on confounding expectations, dodging the familiar. (When a group photograph is taken, there’s no freeze-frame to show the viewer the result.)

As a title, The Smashing Machine isn’t so different from A Beautiful Mind, the title which Ron Howard used for his 2001 film about the mathematician John Nash, the last biopic to receive Best Picture at the Oscars. But there’s a telling baldness to Safdie’s choice. It’s a metaphor, but not sentimentalising or grandly symbolic. It’s also taken from a 2002 HBO documentary about Kerr’s career to which Safdie’s screenplay is eccentrically faithful. (Akiva Goldsman, who wrote A Beautiful Mind, played things somewhat looser with the account given by the biographer Sylvia Nasar.)

It seems possible that Safdie was drawing on the example of Oppenheimer, which avoided biopic manoeuvres and what Nolan called ‘reductive’ psychology with a flashback structure dealing with two periods in Oppenheimer’s adult life and centring on a somewhat left-field personal conflict. Safdie, who won the Silver Bear for Best Director at Venice, goes much further. Everything he does pushes against paradigm – against catharsis, context, explanation, revelation. To this degree, his instincts overlap with Dickinson’s. We only discover where Kerr and his girlfriend Dawn (Emily Blunt) live – after several scenes set in their suburban house – when someone makes a joke about how much they enjoy travelling to Phoenix. We aren’t shown their meeting or told their ages (during filming, Johnson was fifty-two, Blunt forty-one). The subject of children or Dawn’s alcoholism and tendency towards self-harm are raised and apparently shelved within a single scene. We learn nothing about Kerr’s background – from basic details such as his ethnicity, or why he is so drawn to the prospect of a ‘high’, in the form of either victory or opioids.

The story unfolds over three years, from 1997 to 2000 – the span covered by HBO – which includes neither the start nor the end of Kerr’s career, or even the apex. The period does cover the emergence of the UFC, which many viewers will know has become a multi-billion-dollar business, but to Kerr, all that the transition from wrestling means is a different shape of ring (octagonal) and Kerr’s own matches take place in the Japanese counterpart, PRIDE FC, which didn’t become an international sensation. There’s a single reference to the movement against extreme mixed martial arts combat among politicians and cable TV executives – what drove Kerr and others to work in Japan. Everything revealed about Kerr’s institutional environment, and the only traces of social or historical engagement, come in media interviews given by Kerr or Mark Coleman (Ryan Bader), his friend and, following his comeback, rival, though their potential showdown never arrives. (Coleman, who wins the last competition depicted in the film – and later became the first UFC Heavyweight Champion – would have made a more traditional subject for treatment.) It’s typical of the film’s procedures that though we hear about someone who isn’t the President (Ronald Reagan – the incorrect answer Kerr gives in response to paramedics following an overdose), there’s no emphasis on who is.

Safdie, though he fiddles with a few facts, appears resistant to imposing personal or editorial judgment on the material. A scene between Coleman and Dawn ends with him reassuring her, ‘I get it’, but the film has been designed so that there’s rarely anything to get, no graspable underlying logic. A fly-on-the-wall documentary isn’t a closed or internal cohesive narrative system. It functions more like an excerpt, and is likely to produce allusions to events or phenomena beyond its coverage. When Dawn makes her sole reference to having a child, at an advanced point, Kerr replies, ‘you keep bringing this up’. The charge in a film like the HBO original comes from access to a sequestered world. (The earliest examples of American verité, the Direct Cinema of directors like Robert Drew, concerned public figures: the Kennedys, the Beatles, and Bob Dylan.)

Safdie is beholden to a portrayal which – when shorn of the talking-head component – confines his own approach to scenes of a heavyset man trudging around, staring into space, fighting for money, and bickering with his partner. What we are left with is surface: vividness, plausibility. In order to resist the attendant vices of his enterprise – the romanticising habits of a national-cinema tradition – Safdie moves in the opposite direction to Dickinson – towards lo-fi realism, the documentary in style as well as content, going all in on a negative aesthetic and realises many of its dangers.

Read on: Emilie Bickerton, ‘A New Proletkino?’, NLR 109.