Harris Dickinson's Urchin Is a Confident and Compassionate Directorial Debut

Some filmmaker debuts come at you with great guns blazing; first-timers often like to pour everything they’ve got into a project, believing that overstatement is the surest way to grab attention. But Urchin, the debut film from Harris Dickinson—the not-yet-30 English actor who has given terrific, beguiling performances in movies like Eliza Hittman’s Brooklyn teen drama Beach Rats and Halina Reijn’s feverish sex fantasy Babygirl—arrives with a whisper, not a shout. A seemingly straightforward story about an addict barely holding his life together on the streets of London, Urchin is effective because of all the things it doesn’t do: there are no grand revelations, no horrific bottoming-out or OD moments. We’re simply left alone with an addict and his feelings—or, occasionally, his seeming lack of them. And because we don’t know much about where he came from, or how he got hooked, we’re asked to live with him in his present. It’s a desperate, disorienting place. The young man at the story’s center is Mike—played, in a fine-grained, stripped-bare performance, by Frank Dillane, son of actor Stephen Dillane—and in our first glimpse of him, he’s just coming to after having passed out on the street. Mike’s hair sticks up in jagged points; his skin looks like it needs a good, soapy scrub. The movie isn’t called Urchin for nothing: there’s something Dickensian about both Mike’s physical appearance and the shabby street life he’s been relegated to. This is the best he can expect for himself; he lives both in and for the moment, and it doesn’t occur to him that anything could change. Mike procures a knapsack from a hiding place behind a dumpster; later, we’ll see him setting up a makeshift bed for himself, laying down sheets of cardboard with the methodical care of an architect. He begs for money on the street, scowling one minute and flashing a thousand-watt smile the next. A fellow addict, Nathan (played by Dickinson), also looking for his next fix, steals whatever money Mike’s got, and a scuffle breaks out. A stranger intervenes, breaking up the fight, and offers to buy Mike a meal. Mike accepts gratefully—only to beat up this Good Samaritan and run off with his watch. Mike gets caught; he serves jail time. When he’s released, clean, back into the world, he seems eager to set himself straight. He moves into a hostel. He goes to a thrift store and buys a shirt and a pair of hideous reptile loafers that, weirdly, look great on him—there’s a flicker of rock-star charisma about this kid. He gets a job working as a cook in a shabby hotel; his co-workers like him a lot, but this job can’t last. He finds another one, not as good, and meets a freewheeling hippie girl (Megan Northam), who also takes a liking to him. It’s not hard to see why. When sober, Mike is plaintive and watchful; you feel protective of him. But he can also be cruelly, selfishly manipulative. Is that his true nature, or is it simply the thing his addiction unleashes in him? We never really know. Urchin is both a confident and relaxed piece of work. Dickinson, who also wrote the script, isn’t fixated on the more sordid aspects of addiction; here and there he adds dreamy, surreal touches, and the movie ends ambiguously, as it needs to. With addiction, there is no ending—there’s a reason “One day at a time” is the best-known AA motto—and for that reason, Urchin is all middle, more a snapshot of a life than a redemption story. Yet both Dickinson and Dillane make sure that in Mike, we always see a person, not a problem. Even when Mike is close to stumbling, he walks like a dancer, a person inherently at ease with his body. It’s whatever’s going on in his head that triggers both his pain and his need to relieve it. Urchin allows us to walk with him for a time. But after that, for as long as his endless middle might last, he’s on his own. We’re both relieved to be free of him, and sorry to see him go.