Some filmmaker debuts come at you with great guns blazing; first-timers often like to pour everything they’ve got into a project, believing that overstatement is the surest way to grab attention. But Urchin, the debut film from Harris Dickinson—the not-yet-30 English actor who has given terrific, beguiling performances in movies like Eliza Hittman’s Brooklyn teen drama Beach Rats and Halina Reijn’s feverish sex fantasy Babygirl—arrives with a whisper, not a shout. A seemingly straightforward story about an addict barely holding his life together on the streets of London, Urchin is effective because of all the things it doesn’t do: there are no grand revelations, no horrific bottoming-out or OD moments. We’re simply left alone with an addict and his feelings—or, occasionally, his seeming lack of them. And because we don’t know much about where he came from, or how he got hooked, we’re asked to live with him in his present. It’s a desperate, disorienting place.
The young man at the story’s center is Mike—played, in a fine-grained, stripped-bare performance, by Frank Dillane, son of actor Stephen Dillane—and in our first glimpse of him, he’s just coming to after having passed out on the street. Mike’s hair sticks up in jagged points; his skin looks like it needs a good, soapy scrub. The movie isn’t called Urchin for nothing: there’s something Dickensian about both Mike’s physical appearance and the shabby street life he’s been relegated to. This is the best he can expect for himself; he lives both in and for the moment, and it doesn’t occur to him that anything could change.
Mike procures a knapsack from a hiding place behind a dumpster; later, we’ll see him setting up a makeshift bed for himself, laying down sheets of cardboard with the methodical care of an architect. He begs for money on the street, scowling one minute and flashing a thousand-watt smile the next. A fellow addict, Nathan (played by Dickinson), also looking…
