DRAMA; 1hr 39 min
STARRING: Frank Dillane, Megan Northam, Harris Dickinson
Two blue: Northam and Dillane
The homeless are mostly invisible to the wider world in Babygirl star Harris Dickinson’s feature-film directorial debut. Mike (a haunted Dillane) is one of those barely seen lost souls: a young guy who might as well be decades older, at war with a London nobody would want to visit. His CV is a primer in rootlessness, and after living on the streets for five years, his prospects are an all-round downer.
They creak up a notch, ironically, when after serving eight months for assault and robbery, he is temporarily housed in a hostel and lands a job as a commis chef. But no gig is a failsafe career path with Mike and his self-sabotaging issues.
Sooner or later, whatever course Mike attempts to take — the job, the counselling, the meditation tapes, the fledgling relationship (with Northam’s Andrea) — is bound to split wide open. It’s not that he doesn’t have a goal. Despite himself, he does, which in a way makes everything worse. To dream of managing an elite chauffeuring business while repeatedly failing to manage your own basic impulses is yet another jolt of existential cruelty.
Dickinson, who also plays a supporting role as a fellow struggler, layers the creeping thrall of Mike’s narcotised crack-ups with bittersweet glimmers of what could have been if he weren’t such a self-sabotaging mess. The details of his backstory are never fully explained, and nor do they need to be, for Mike alone is his own undoing. In a world unequipped to pick up the pieces, he is the ultimate casualty of a fractured self.
