The Dance Floor Is Always at the Center of Steve McQueen’s ‘Lovers Rock’ - Rolling Stone

The second chapter of the five-film Small Axe, in which Steve McQueen attempts to excavate glimpses of black British life from the Sixties through the Eighties, is rooted in reggae.

There’s a strong chance that anyone recommending Steve McQueen’s Lovers Rock — the second chapter of his ongoing Small Axe film series, now streaming on Amazon Prime Video — has gone out of their way to mention that scene.

All of which is consistent with McQueen’s particular mission in Small Axe — even as Lovers Rock stands out in part for adhering less closely to straight narrative than the other films here.

The five-film Small Axe is McQueen’s attempt to excavate glimpses of black British life from the 1960s through the 1980s.

And it astutely, at times even polemically, dredges up everything that comes with this territory: the police violence and ensuing uprisings, the music and food and rituals of daily life, the prevailing attempts of black immigrants to make spaces for themselves — and to hold onto and protect those spaces — in a country whose hostilities were impressed upon them by not only their neighbors, but the highest powers in the land.

You can feel that power in Lovers Rock despite this being a film that by-and-large pushes those forces to the margins and puts black immigrant life itself, black youth and music and soul, front and center.

Where Mangrove, Small Axe’s opening number, detailed the police attacks and ensuing uprisings surrounding the storied Mangrove restaurant — a West Indian mecca in London’s Notting Hill — Lovers Rock’s attention is strictly trained on the space itself.

It’s an opening which, like the “Silly Games” sequence — and like the equally invigorating “Kunta Kinte Dub” sequence following that one — captures so much of what the film’s remaining hour will accomplish.

For a movie that so often feels plotless — and is far more evocative for it — Lovers Rock is heavy with events and strands of narrative that flow in and out of each other.

I think, too, of the abundance of holy crosses — and of the way an immigrant generation’s religion, impressed upon their British-born children, comes off as both a safety net and a rebuke to the unholy matrimonies of music, sex, bodily freedom. .

The movie feels at times like a miracle — not least for what it does not do.

But the intentions rang loud and clear, and they came to mind as I watched the dance scenes Lovers Rock, with their similar sprawl and adamant resistance to the easy, quick-cutting satisfaction you’ll find in most any other movie.

With minimal dialogue and maximum attentiveness, McQueen and his collaborators tell entire stories between people — and between the people onscreen and their British situation writ large, which is only missing from this movie is you’re watching it literally

The soundtrack is, accordingly and unsurprisingly, a winner — but the movie is doing more than making the most of its soundtrack