Isaac Julien’s feature from 1991 is rereleased after more than 30 years and it still feels fresh, buoyant, likable and emotionally open. It is a paean to diversity and intersectionality set in east London during the 1977 Queen’s silver jubilee, with some cheeky jibes about middle-class outlaws and “St Martins” art-school types (St Martins being Julien’s own alma mater). Young Soul Rebels takes the form of an urban pastoral, but is also a kind of romantic comedy, a coming-of-age drama about friendship and a thriller about a brutal homophobic murder – and there’s actually a clever plot twist about the victim’s tape-deck which another type of film might have made much more of, maybe in the manner of Francis Ford Coppola.
A young black man is murdered while cruising in a park and the news has different effects on his friends, Chris (Valentine Nonyela) and Caz (Mo Sesay) who run a pirate radio station called Soul Patrol. Chris is stunned but Caz is all the more determined to throw himself into his music and maybe get them both a job on the local white-owned radio station, Metropolitan, which has a huge patriotic crown in the lobby and a life-sized cutout of the Queen, waving. (I’m surprised no one’s done that for King Charles.) Chris is angry that Caz is not as grief-stricken as he is, and pulls away from him into a relationship with stroppy white punk Billibud (Jason Durr); meanwhile, biracial and bisexual Caz faces bigotry from his black friends and he retreats from Chris into a new relationship with a production assistant at the radio station: this is Tracy, in which role Sophie Okonedo made a terrifically warm debut.
Chris and Caz’s soul music fights its corner in a world of reggae, disco and punk and the movie’s humane message is that these types of music could and did coexist; their coexistence was a life lesson. As for the slightly unreal denouement to the thriller plot, I felt that Young Soul Rebels has a touch of the cartoonishness that often creeps into British cinema. But this film still has a life-giving pulse of energy.
• Young Soul Rebels is released on 28 April in cinemas.
