Swift Street may take its name from an actual street in Preston, Melbourne where creator, co-writer and co-director Tig Terera once lived, but it could just as easily read as a reference to the speed of the show itself. This new SBS crime drama, set on felony-filled streets, moves at a hectic pace just like its characters: they need to move quickly or they’re toast.
Terera fills the series with bad behaviour, bad blood and bad debts, rehashing the old “need to pay back a mobster before they cap your knees” chestnut. But all of it feels rather fresh and spunky, thanks in part to a roaring lead performance from Tanzyn Crawford as Elsie, a tenacious 21-year-old attempting to pay off debts accrued by her nogoodnik father Robert (Cliff Curtis).
The show begins, well, swiftly: Elsie moves like a bat out of hell through streets and laneways to the thrashing tune of Sma3 from Moroccan punk band Taqbir. She storms into her home, clearly baying for blood, looking for Robert, who she finds attached to a noose in his bedroom. It’s a hell of an opener, hitting you smack-bang in the kisser with a charge of visceral energy. We soon learn Robert needs to raise $26,000 to pay back a debt and Elsie agrees to help him, through various schemes cooked up across a thoroughly bingeable eight episode season.
Elsie has several side hustles, including flogging fake IDs and stealing electronic goods, and hangs around with several ne’er-do-wells; at one point, a mate asks her “What are you doing tonight – wanna climb Town Hall roof around 10 o’clock?” as if this were a perfectly ordinary way to spend the evening.
But Robert is her biggest headache and the show’s true agent of chaos: a hopeless own-worst-enemy figure played with a disarming combination of charisma and mopiness by the ever-reliable Curtis. He’s a no-hoper, a desperado, a trouble magnet; a person who’s messed up too many times to remember what life was like with his head above water.
Keiynan Lonsdale is also great as Elsie’s friend Tom; just like her, he is a dynamic character, with the intensely unsettled energy of a volcano right before it erupts. Tom has made big mistakes that resulted in the end of his boxing career and now works for a formidable crime boss called “The Mechanic” (Eliza Matengu).
I wasn’t particularly impressed by this character: a seething mobster with an energy that felt a little too comic book-like to fully gel with the rest of the show, which has a hot-blooded, adrenaline-charged verisimilitude that never takes the viewer’s attention for granted. Its jumpy, gritty texture and self-destructive characters reminded me of the Australian film Idiot Box, starring Ben Mendelsohn as a two-bit criminal whose personal motto is “maximum fear, minimum time.”
Terera’s camera gets among it, restlessly moving and careening, though never at the expense of the drama; the story and presentation style coalesce very impressively. The “find the money or else” plotline is hardly original, but here we can see why it’s used so often: to push characters out of their comfort zones and get them making rash, dramatically interesting decisions, even if a crime-don’t-pay plotline ultimately culminates in a resolution that feels a tad boilerplate.
It’s not all crime and misbehaviour, though: there are softer elements involving Elsie and her estranged mother (Bolude Watson), as well as some tender scenarios with her friends. These moments show Terera and co-director Nicholas Verso impressively oscillating between gentle and hard-hitting drama. So too does Crawford: her performance sometimes very impactfully raises the volume, then slows things down to bring the feels.
In terms of its emotional essence, Swift Street is framed from the beginning as a story about a father and daughter – though it’s easy to forget that, given the show’s breakneck pacing and sheer sass. It moves, baby, and it’s an absolute blast.
Swift Street starts on SBS tonight at 8.30pm and will be available to stream on SBS On Demand
