REDEMPTION SONGS

Actor Harris Dickinson announces himself as a thoughtful, gutsy filmmaker, writes Clarisse Loughrey, while a real-life horror story is warped by a heady dose of Hollywood drama

- Clarisse Loughrey

Urchin

Harris Dickinson is a name you'll be hearing a hell of a lot more of once he debuts as John Lennon in Sam Mendes's quartet of Beatles biopics. And he’s moved that discerning hand of his behind the lens for his directorial debut, Urchin.

It’s the opposite of a vanity project. In fact, it’s exactly the kind of work you hope for from an actor turned director — proof that Dickinson hasn’t wasted the enviable cinematic education provided to him by past collaborators Joanna Hogg, Steve McQueen and Babygirl’s Halina Reijn, and that he’s meaningfully considered what he can contribute by stepping behind the camera.

Urchin, a social-realist project with roots in Mike Leigh’s work, is open both to the kind of abstractions McQueen might pursue and the sweeter, observational humour that Charlotte Regan championed in Scrapper, another Dickinson-starrer. But all that style has a focused purpose: it lets us climb inside the head of its protagonist Mike (Frank Dillane), homeless and trapped in the addiction spiral, while faithfully depicting his extreme marginalisation from society.

Cinematographer Josée Deshaies might set up her camera on the other side of a busy road, so that we can only steal a few looks at Mike asking commuters for spare change. Then, when he’s alone in the shower, surrounded by silence for the first time in who knows when, the camera careens down the plughole and into his psyche, all hellish volcanic rock, amoebas, and water-slick caverns.

To whittle it all down, the point of