Harris Dickinson must have hated Aladdin. After watching a street urchin sing his way into a princess’s heart, I’m picturing a pissed off 9 year old Harris screaming at the TV “where’s the emotional truth in that?” After getting famous for making Nicole Kidman drink milk, Dickinson uses that pissed off 9 year old trauma to show people what a real life street Urchin is actually like. I don’t remember the sleeping on boxes part of Disney’s theme parks.
Those box sleeps are actually the best part of Mike’s (Frank Dillane) day. Otherwise, he has to panhandle in London for food or drinks, or get pissed when fellow homeless person Nathan (Harris Dickinson) steals his wallet. Even when a good Samaritan like Simon (Okezie Morro) buys him something, Mike can’t help himself and greedily mugs the guy and pawns his watch. That assault is caught on CCTV; Mike gets sent to jail for a year and gets put in a hostel for 6 months by his parole officer Nadia (Buckso Dhillon-Wooley) and set up as a cook at a hotel to see if repeat offender Mike can get his life together.
The first 20-30 minutes are necessary to set up who Mike is and what his life looks like: a little mini day in the life short film. It’s a bleak state of affairs: he’s clearly just drifting in and out of life, only caring enough to get the drugs he intends to abuse. Everything is about impulse and immediate gratification: whatever Mike wants he’s gonna try and get as easily as possible. So even when a nice guy like Simon helps him out on food, that’s not enough: Mike sees that watch as the quickest way to getting the drugs he needs, so he goes for it. Mike’s a pretty hideous guy for sure, but when we see his one phone call to his mom who clearly has disowned him, we feel the overwhelming stakes the poor guy is up against, unequipped to handle them.
No matter what the circumstances. Urchin’s power is what happens after Mike gets arrested, where the roots of recidivism are near impossible to break. Prison looks at first like a godsend: Mike got sober, and Nadia’s help has landed the boy a job and at least housing to see if he can try to start over. Little wins go over big for the guy, who uses the self-help CD’s to really try to give it a go with a real life. But those little victories are always fleeting, as Mike is constantly confronted with the sins of his past he has to deal with. This makes the guy emotionally volatile, and that bad behavior starts to rear its ugly head in small doses at first, and then bigger ones. Mike tries other outlets: new job, maybe a girlfriend Andrea (Megan Northam), but all those new paths end up in dead ends. Why? Because Mike can’t shake his past, and becomes consumed by it at the expense of everyone in his life. And so the cycle brings us right back to where we started, a new rock bottom that relative unknown Frank Dillane shows us with each incredible heartbreaking moment, slowly transforming right back to where he was at minute one.
Even with well thought out resources, the UK’s recidivism rate is still 25%. 1 out of 4 criminals are like Mike, stuck in a cycle they can never escape. The US is even worse, double that in the worst places. I never expected Harris Dickinson to be the one to make a film about this, so props to him for dispelling the Aladdin myth of the street rat. Although there is even some karaoke in Urchin too. I guess even Dickinson’s trauma roots are that deep.