By John Corrado

As an actor, Harris Dickinson has already impressed us with his performances in Babygirl and Triangle of Sadness. So it’s fitting that, in his confident feature directorial debut Urchin, a stripped down drama about poverty and addiction, he gives another young performer the chance to take centre stage.

That actor is Frank Dillane, who stars in Dickinson’s film as Mike, a homeless drug addict struggling to get clean and make ends meet in London. The result is a scrappy yet assured film, following a rough-living protagonist trying to turn his life around, but stuck in a world that keeps threatening to drag him back into his old ways.

Near the start, Mike gets into a skirmish with Nathan (played by Dickinson), another homeless man whom he confronts over stealing his wallet. A man intervenes, and offers to help, only for Mike to turn around and steal his watch. We feel the desperation of the whole thing, characters so desperate for their next fix, that they will literally steal from those offering a helping hand.

From here, Urchin mainly explores Mike’s struggles to find housing and employment after serving time in prison, desperate for work either in a hotel kitchen or picking up trash, but lacking adequate supports to properly integrate into the workforce. Mike has the potential to go far, but keeps crashing down, either through poor choices that he makes, or a patchwork social support system. Dickinson doesn’t seem interested in blaming one over the other, but rather offering a grounded portrait of the realities faced by a character such as this.

Dillane keeps us captivated with his twitchy, always fascinating performance as Mike, a character who elicits as much sympathy as he does frustration. Dickinson’s screenplay keeps his backstory intentionally vague. We learn a few details, but we are mainly just watching him drift through, struggling to hold on to employment or housing. The film recognizes the cruel absurdity of his situation at times, with the protagonist himself even seeming to realize it.

It’s this fearlessness to craft a film about addiction and homelessness that doesn’t offer easy answers, or serve as “inspiration porn,” that makes Dickinson’s debut stand out, even letting his characters do unlikeable things while still allowing us to sympathize with them on a human level. Behind the camera, Dickinson lets the film unfold in long takes that allow us to simply observe the characters and naturalistic performances, as Mike encounters a colourful array of fellow drifters struggling to get by.

This neorealist approach is matched by a few magical realist touches, with Dickinson taking cues from fellow filmmakers like Andrea Arnold. The result is a raw but still compassionate portrait of a troubled young man, built around a compelling performance from Dillane that blends elements of tragedy, hostility, and sympathy.

Film Rating: ★★★ (out of 4)

Urchin opens exclusively in theatres in limited release on October 31st, including at TIFF Lightbox in Toronto. It’s being distributed in Canada by Films We Like.