‘You seem like a nice bloke, so I’m gonna give you some advice. Don’t trust me mum – she’ll destroy your life.” That’s the heads-up from young Leeds tearaway Urban (Fraser Kelly) to Chop (Richard Armitage), who has shacked up with the former’s hard-partying mother Greta (Anna Friel). Adapted from Bernard Hare’s 2005 memoir Urban Grimshaw and the Shed Crew, getting life guidance from 11-year-olds is par for the course in a topsy-turvy demi-monde of absentee parents, latchkey kids and rife substance abuse. Originally shot in 2015 and seemingly re-edited in between, the film succumbs to a fatal lack of perspective itself – never fully sure of whose story this is and what purchase to offer on the stunted lives on show.
Urban was born in prison and, packed off into care with his other five siblings, only has a passing relationship with Greta. So when we meet him in the mid-1990s well committed to a life of chirpy vagrancy and “twocking” around Leeds’s estates and red-brick terraces, there’s a glimmer of hope when ex-social worker Chop arrives in his life. Impressed by the kid’s savvy and smarts, Chop tries to help Greta get back custody of him, takes him camping in Scotland, and wins the confidences of the “Shed Crew”, a group of other young refugees from chaotic home lives who gather in a makeshift wasteland den.
The lead performances are all committed, with Kelly showing beyond-his-years intensity, Friel overspilling with gaunt-faced gusto, and Armitage – The Hobbit’s Thorin Oakenshield – putting his innate nobility to good effect. (Surely he is Sean Bean’s successor in being able to make swearing sound heroic.) But, with Chop’s motivations for wanting to spend his time with this bunch of urchins too weakly sketched, he remains largely a cheap cipher for goodness in this hardscrabble environment.
Rather than offering a damning panorama of deprivation through telling characterisation, director Candida Brady is prone to capricious tone shifts that collapse into sentimentality. Most of the joyriding, fighting and intergenerational drug-bingeing is played for larks, over-scored to make sure we swallow the northern-glory triteness. At one point, when Chop noses around the shed, we get a ballad on the soundtrack intoning: “This is our home, this is our place / It may seem nothing special … ” (It’s a million miles from, say, how Perfect Day is caustically used in Trainspotting.) It’s this complacency that ultimately saps this indulgent drama of much telling insight about poverty and modern Britain.
• I Am Urban is released in UK cinemas on 3 November.
