‘Urchin’ dives into one man’s struggle to rise above

Harris Dickinson doesn’t pander in his focus on addiction in a directorial debut.

- GLENN WHIPP COLUMNIST

FRANK DILLANE portrays Mike, a homeless man dealing with addiction, in Harris Dickinson’s “Urchin.”

(Festival de Cannes)

Harris Dickinson's feature directorial debut, “Urehin,” introducesus from adistance to its subject inits opening shot. It’s a gray morning and Mike (Frank Dillane) is lying on the pavement ofa busy, dirty London street, roused by the unwelcome exhortations of a street preacher. Mike gathers himself, shushes the woman for waking him and then collects his belongings to begin a day of panhandling. He’s not very good at it and is roundly ignored by people going about their lives.

Mike is someone who you see nearly every day, particularly if you live in a city. But do you really see him? “Urchin” asks you to train your focus on this one particular homeless man, a drug addict, for about an hour and a half and, at the very least, try to understand him and his struggle to get his life back on track. The movie, which Dickinson also wrote, takes pains to shy away from making any grand political statements, anapproach that, atleast for this particular story, might be the most effective way to ask its audience to consider a broken system and how it fails people like Mike.