'Alex Wheatle': Film Review - Hollywood Reporter

Early in Steve McQueen's Alex Wheatle, the young protagonist whose name gives the film its title prompts derision from a barber shop full of Londoners of West Indian descent by revealing that he doesn't consider himself African.

"I might be Black, but I'm from Surrey," says the young Brit abandoned by his Jamaican parents, who has grown up in the loveless Social Services foster-care system.

Wheatle, played in his childhood years by Asad-Shareef Muhammad and as a teenager by Sheyi Cole, is the widely translated author of more than 15 novels for young adults, awarded an MBE in 2008 for services to literature.

Co-written by McQueen with Alastair Siddons, who also scripted the Mangrove and Education episodes, Alex Wheatle focuses on a slender chapter of the protagonist's life.

He reconnects with Valin, and the two begin a DJ operation, with Alex writing lyrics about Brixton life.

The biggest eye-opener for Alex is the tragedy of the New Cross fire of 1981, in which 13 young Black people were killed and many more injured.

Unrest in the Black community escalates, leading to the Brixton Uprising, which is depicted on a small scale but with visceral force, as young Black men including Alex face down lines of cops with riot shields.

The 1938 book by the Trinidadian socialist historian figures also in McQueen's Mangrove, one of many understated thematic links that bind the Small Axe anthology together despite the films' range of styles.

The film's conclusion is both abrupt, in that it feels like Alex's life is just beginning in earnest, and apposite in its delicate portrait of the artist as a young man

Perhaps more than with any of the other Small Axe films to date, it's easy to imagine an analogous epiphany in the early life of the young McQueen

Director: Steve McQueen

Screenwriters: Alastair Siddons, Steve McQueen

Executive producers: Tracey Scoffield, David Tanner, Steve McQueen

Editors: Chris Dickens, Steve McQueen