Harris Dickinson makes a terrifically impressive debut here as a writer-director with this smart and compassionate picture about homelessness. It is engaging, sympathetically acted and layered with genuinely funny moments, mysterious and hallucinatory set-pieces, and challenges the notion of the haves who fear the contagious risk of coming into contact with the have-nots.
Frank Dillane is Mike, a guy who has spent five years living on the streets in London: begging, stealing, eating at charity food trucks. Dillane’s performance shows Mike’s nervy, twitchy, livewire mannerisms have been cultivated over what feels like a lifetime of abandonment: he has a kind of suppressed pleading quality as he asks passersby for the spare change that fewer people carry in these post-Covid times. His open smile has a learned survivalist determination, but what he has is not exactly charm. He is slippery and unreliable, but also intelligent and heartbreakingly vulnerable.
