Gotham Awards Revue: "Urchin"

by Nick Taylor

As with Familiar Touch, I am very solidly impressed by the filmmaking debut on display in Urchin, but first I need to know how the leading turn at the center of this wasn’t nominated. Frank Dillane is magnetic as Mike, the unhoused addict trying to reintegrate into London society after his latest stint in prison. He gives a very extroverted, mannered performance of a strung-out young man rooted in an empathetic understanding of Mike’s decision-making and needs. He never showboats at the cost of the other cast members, instead showing himself to be a receptive, active scene partner. Dillane finds a man who isn’t particularly malicious even when he uses others. At no point does this character stand in for any social issue or personality type, even as the film posits his story as a parable of how an individual’s recovery and downfall are informed by the support they receive. Nothing affects Mike’s ability to take care of himself more than the government housing he receives and later loses...

Urchin is a pretty fabulous example of how strong direction can intervene in addiction drama templates without divesting from them completely. Dickinson mobilizes his cast towards uniformly humane, detailed performances, never demonizing or sentimentally softening any characters for rhetorical points. Dickinson’s visual style sustains this social realist milieu, opting for wide shots as often as possible and allowing multiple scenes to unfold in long takes. We get to see the actors physically relate to each other and to the spaces they’re inhabiting. A tale that could be rendered in claustrophobic isolation becomes a social panorama. The pulsing electronic score is a notable divergence from Urchin’s otherwise naturalistic style, going for Safdie-esque electronic pulsation, yet these touches never turn Mike’s journey into a lurid morality tale.

Shooting Urchin in this style is not a typical approach, yet it feels rooted in the best qualities of Dickinson’s own acting. He wears his characters on his frame so easily, making the most inward-facing loners radiate a tangible, roiling inner life for the camera even if the person talking to him only sees a blank pretty boy. Dickinson even appears in a handful of scenes as a fellow drifter named Nathan, folding neatly into the corner of his skilled ensemble without distracting us with his skill and beauty.

Back to his behind-the-camera feats: Dickinson is good at sharp-edged scene transitions, showing us pieces of narrative development with just enough force and color that he’s able to impress their value without spending a ton of time on Mike’s housing troubles or personal rehabilitation. We might want more time with an affable but not always accessible social worker, or a therapist who doesn’t realize he might be condescending to his client, but Dickinson ensures their presence and absence are equally impactful in this story. In other words, his direction sustains scripted gambits that might have felt undercooked in lesser hands.

Before we go, we must talk about Urchin’s final sequence. After Mike receives a couple bad spills and cold rejections, he returns to his haunt from the beginning of the film, only to be led down a surreal, symbolically loaded path, meeting a few familiar faces before being (metaphorically?) pushed out a window. It’s not a difficult sequence to interpret, but it’s so aesthetically detached from everything we’ve seen prior that I have a hard time believing this was the conclusion Urchin needed. 

Dickinson and Dillane track the developments Mike experiences in the gaps of this fractured script, never losing sight of who this man is, even as he slips through the cracks before our eyes. Because really, how much hope could Mike have to save himself when all possible roads to stability are taken from him? Urchin makes this point without having to spell it out, instead trusting in its audience to pick up what it’s been putting down the whole time. There's a rare understanding of Mike's addiction as being a symptom of his systemic neglect, a manifestation of his helplessness rather than the reason for his inability to fit in. As a portrait of one young man struggling to pull himself together and the larger societal contexts informing what he can and can’t do, Dickinson makes a strong case for his own artistic prowess without turning this into an announcement of multi-hyphenate ingenuity.

I left Urchin thinking about Mike before I thought about Harris, and I’d call that a fair endorsement of what he sets out to do. These aren’t a novel set of risks or genre elements, and some might find Dickinson more indebted to its influences than I do, but he largely succeeds at making Urchin feel distinctly its own.

Urchin is currently available to buy or rent on most major streaming platforms. It's nominated for the Best Breakthrough Director Gotham.