The social-realist tag is so often the signal for something worthy and burdened with its own loyalty to grimness. Nothing could be further from the truth for this vibrant youth drama devised by Theresa Ikoko and Claire Wilson in collaboration with the mostly non-professional cast and directed by Sarah Gavron. It is bursting with vitality, creativity, passion and fun, and the young stars supercharge it with energy.
Newcomer Bukky Bakray plays an 11-year-old British-Nigerian girl in east London nicknamed Rocks, who has a smart kid brother, Emmanuel (wonderfully played by another great child actor, D’angelou Osei Kissiedu). Their mum is well meaning but has, as her outreach worker delicately puts it, issues managing her medication. One day she vanishes, leaving a note to Rocks telling her it is now her responsibility to look after Emmanuel. In this moment, Rocks has been upgraded to parent status, carer status, mum status, leapfrogging what she might have hoped would be a carefree late-teen or early twentysomething period and straight into the careworn age of adulthood.
She has all of the responsibility now but none of the power, and has to keep everything a deadly secret if she and Emmanuel are not to be taken into care. So Rocks and Emmanuel effectively go on the run together, with Rocks making a gargantuan effort to look after him, effectively outside the law.
Yet the real power and inspiration of the film come when nothing particularly is happening, and Rocks and her friends are just hanging out. Occasionally, these scenes will erupt into something dramatic, such as when a food fight kicks off in the middle of a home economics class or when a teacher is talked back to. But the film challenges what might otherwise be seen as a sentimental picture of school friendship. (I found myself thinking about comparable school scenes in Michaela Coel’s I May Destroy You, though these are at an older level.)
Rocks and Emmanuel have to take refuge in their friends’ homes, like safe houses for some resistance movement. At the home of one friend, Sumaya (Kosar Ali), Rocks is crucified with unlovely envy of her happy home. Another friend, Agnes (Ruby Stokes), takes the pair in but informs on them to the authorities – something that Rocks takes as the ultimate betrayal, but perhaps understands, at some level, that something like this was bound to happen sooner or later.
There is something deeply sad and mysterious about this film. Rocks is a courageous young heroine who did everything she could, everything that was asked of her – and inevitably it was not enough. Rocks is shown in the film’s final section having accepted what has happened in her life, and that what she was trying to achieve after her mum left – insofar as she formulated that thought at all – was not viable. And yet she has survived, and that fact, together with her extreme youth, is extremely moving.
