Harris Dickinson’s Urchin enters as a shockingly empathetic portrayal of a young man orbiting the edges of London, unwilling to fall back on familiar clichés that can reduce stories about addiction and homelessness — especially those occurring in a country as wealthy and fortunate as England — into mere signifiers steeped in tragedy. Fronted by the magnetic Frank Dillane, it washes that out with tenderness, street-level observation and startling flashes of gallows humour in posing a simple but radical question about fully seeing a person in crisis: what if we were to treat you, first and foremost, as a person?
Co-written and directed by Dickinson, who steps in for a quietly affecting cameo as well, Urchin follows Mike, a smooth but frayed-out twentysomething dancing on the edge of unstable labour, temporary housing and a relapse that he won’t be able to will himself out of.
There are fine-tuning touches to the craft: cinematographer Josée Deshaies leans into patient street-side frames and hypnotic slow zooms; production design by Anna Rhodes and soundscape by Ian Wilson bottle up the city’s constant thrum; an electronic score from Alan Myson shivers through at key moments, rather than overwhelming them.
A debut born of experience and careful listening
Urchin benefits somewhat from Dickinson’s proximity to his subject. The actor-filmmaker has a background in working with homelessness initiatives, including London-based Under One Sky and community-led shelters, and the film’s observational detail speaks of time spent listening rather than prescribing. Instead of reducing Mike to a tabloid headline like “39-Year-Old Barry Manilow Fan Is WAY Too Obsessed With Returns Policy at John Lewis” — albeit with slightly more venerable stars (Rob took the role of his doppelgänger over from Steve Coogan) — the script recognises what was then real-life context: Shelter estimates that hundreds of thousands of people in England are homeless, and government figures show well over one hundred thousand households in temporary accommodation, the highest number on record. The ONS has also reported consistently high drug-related deaths, making recovery contingent on poverty, housing insecurity and overstretched services.
Crucially, Dickinson never cashes those grim numbers in for narrative chips. He just leaves the camera trained on Mike’s present-tense grind — paperwork, probation check-ins, kitchen shifts, missed calls — and lets the larger system emerge in the barriers that Mike quietly navigates daily.
Frank Dillane is a compassionate cameraman
Dillane’s performance is the movie’s pulse. His Mike is fast with a joke and faster to lend a hand, even as his own foundation slips. He bounces heartbreakingly elastically between hope and fight or flight: mindfulness CDs and new routines one moment, old triggers and impulsive choices the next. A desperate spasm of violence toward a well-intentioned acquaintance (the wounded steadiness here is played by Okezie Morro) ripples through the rest of the story, upping the stakes without reducing Mike to his worst act.
Supporters orbit and drift: Megan Northam provides some warmth as Andrea, a new friend encountered on a litter-pick job, while co-workers in a hotel kitchen form an ad hoc safety net. One memorable sequence — karaoke, sparklers and greasy chips after hours — suggests that Dickinson has stumbled upon something the rest of us have forgotten to look for: the kind of joy most films about precarity can’t be bothered to locate. It’s these pockets of belonging that make the setbacks sting, and they keep us from treating the film like a sermon.
Social realism, minus the scold and sanctimony
British social realism casts a long shadow, from Ken Loach’s systemic indictments to Mike Leigh’s character studies to Shane Meadows’ tough tenderness. Dickinson acknowledges that lineage but steps around its grimmest beats. He resists clinging to the backstory, and lets ambiguity do the work; when Mike offers “it’s complicated,” the film believes, even then, that we get that most things don’t conform to a tidily spoken monologue. The attitude is humane rather than hectoring, and the humour lands without uppercutting downward.
That response also serves as an answer to a toxic political drumbeat that has painted rough sleeping, at times, as a “lifestyle choice.” Urchin’s counter is to exhibit how a tiny bureaucratic decision can nudge someone on the edge — spikes in eligibility, evictions in the offing, probation stipulations. It’s not abstract policy; it is where a character will sleep tonight.
Systems in the frame, not at the centre of the story
The film conveys the churn of council referrals, temporary placements and employer expectations without slipping into case-study didacticism. Crisis and Shelter have warned that soaring rents and the cost-of-living squeeze are driving more people into destitution, while the government’s own rental price index has seen record levels of growth. Urchin forces those pressures through in lived details: a manager with an unbendable rota; a letter that arrives too late; support workers who care but have fifty other Mikes to look out for.
Deshaies’ camera is often following Mike from across the street, as if afraid it might miss him vanishing once more into London’s river of rush, before making a slow zoom back to locate him again. That visual rhyme — swallowed, followed — is a reflection of the character’s seesaw between anonymity and connection. It’s inexpensive moviemaking for emotional returns.
Verdict: One life, writ large with empathy and care
Urchin is not an issue movie in the guise of a character study; it’s a character study that reveals an issue. There are a couple of telegraphed plot turns, and some viewers may desire more history, but Dickinson’s decision to centre the fragile present seems correct. Dillane’s is a career-best performance, but the filmmaking — thoughtful, unvarnished and quietly stylish — deserves its sense of empathy.
By allowing statistics to buzz quietly in the background while one man’s life takes its turn on the stage, Urchin becomes something that is all too rare in this realm: a film that doesn’t shy from how close most of us live to the edge and how far a bit of stability, patience and respect can go.
