When inspirational director Alan Clarke cooked up an authentic television portrait of incarcerated British youth in the late 1970s, the resultant film was so alarming that it was promptly banned by the BBC. Clarke subsequently remade Scum for the cinema, and both the small- and big-screen versions of his most notorious work have since cast long shadows over their respective mediums. Plaudits, then, to David Mackenzie for fashioning a tough but empathetic (if uneven) prison drama which marks out its own territory in an arena in which Clarke's epochal work is still the daddy, even now.
Shot (but not set) in Northern Ireland on a tight schedule and even tighter budget, this eye-catching and frequently pulse-pounding drama finds high-risk young offender Eric (Jack O'Connell) being moved up to an adult prison where he will have to fend for himself among hardened cons. Despite the title's glamorous ring, it seems that the only way for Eric is down, having been written off as a lost cause by prison governor Haynes, whose callousness borders upon caricature. Yet within the walls of his new home Eric finds two very different mentors; the first, a hollow-eyed therapist who believes that anger management can help this troubled youth escape his violent past, a claim which invites derision and hostility in equal measure; the second, his father – a battle-hardened inmate with whom (in the script's greatest act of dramatic contrivance) he now shares a prison wing.
Drawing on his own experiences working with violent offenders in HMP Wandsworth, poet/psychotherapist-turned-screenwriter Jonathan Asser brings the unmistakable smack of insider knowledge to this, his first feature, demonstrating a fine ear for the nuances of macho verbal sparring, scratching away at the surface to reveal weaknesses and insecurities lurking just under the skin. His onscreen alter ego is Oliver, a terrifically edgy performance from Rupert Friend, whose angular body language speaks volumes, and whose reasons for placing himself in the line of fire are rooted in neatly unspecified personal trauma. Meanwhile, Ben Mendelsohn once again proves himself the master of the supremely scuzzy antihero as Eric's wretched father, Neville, following memorably unhealthy turns in Animal Kingdom and Killing Them Softly with another portrait of an aggressively broken man to whom life has not been kind – and vice versa.
The real power of Starred Up, however, comes from O'Connell's electrified and electrifying performance – a sinewy symphony of volatility which makes his presence felt not merely in the cells and corridors of the drama, but right there in the auditorium; you half expect him to jump out of the screen and remonstrate forcibly with the audience. Having made his mark in films as diverse as Eden Lake (good), Harry Brown (bad) and most recently 300: Rise of an Empire (ugly), Skins graduate O'Connell has the confidence, presence and swagger of a seasoned performer, despite his relatively tender years. At times, there's a hint of the young Malcolm McDowell about him, particularly during an intrusive prison induction sequence, which mirrors an infamous set piece from Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange – the difference being that while the wily Alex DeLarge snaps to attention when faced with military-style authority, Eric merely becomes even more unreadable, more uncontrollable, more feral. A sequence in which the young inmate slips his restraints and winds up with his teeth around a prison officer's testicles has the muscular ferocity of a pit bull, yet even in these moments we are aware that Eric is himself a victim – the core credo of Asser's script.
While metaphorical father-son relationships litter such stories, Asser takes things one step further, nodding toward Greek tragedy (and, increasingly, melodrama) as Eric wrestles with the all too real and present figure of his dad. Although this is a prison drama, it can also be read as a tale of domestic violence in which the sins of the fathers are visited upon their (innocent?) offspring, who are in turn condemned to repeat their parents' crimes ad infinitum. For this theme to work, it's necessary for O'Connell to embody both threat and vulnerability, a complex balancing act he handles with aplomb. Scenes in which he prepares for a future attack by fashioning a razor-sharp shank from a toothbrush reminded me of Tahar Rahim's dynamite performance in Jacques Audiard's A Prophet, which similarly combined barely contained anxiety with grim and deadly resolve.
For David Mackenzie, director of Young Adam and Hallam Foe, Starred Up is a step up for which he apparently prepared by watching Robert Bresson's A Man Escaped and Don Siegel's Escape from Alcatraz. Despite the plot's gradual move from earthy reality to something rather more histrionic (implausibility battles authenticity), Mackenzie keeps us grounded in the maze of prison life, coaxing powerful performances from his cast, each apparently encouraged and emboldened to find their own space. To this end, Mackenzie is well served by Winter's Bone cinematographer Michael McDonough, who captures the claustrophobia of the physical environment without reducing the characters within the frame; the cells may be boxy, but the breadth and scope of the people within are wide indeed.
