An extraordinary group of rookie actors make this a must-see
Rocks
★★★★★
Dir Sarah Gavron
Starring Bukky Bakray, Kosar Ali, D’angelou Osei Kissiedu, Shaneighamonik Greyson, Ruby Stokes, Tawheda Begum, Afi Okaidja
Robbie Collin
From the East End rooftop where Shola (Bukky Bakray) and her friends are killing time, the London skyline looks like a science fiction vision. Its hazy, glassy spires are very different from the city they call home – a clutter of classrooms, street markets and housing estates, where the flats pile up in shoebox stacks. Rocks is a film about that city – and, specifically, its hardy young female inhabitants, whose energy and resilience starts to feel like the place’s very heartbeat. It’s a contemporary coming-of-age story that isn’t quite like anything else in British cinema, and contains all the vibrancy, drama and joy of teenage life in dizzy abundance.
It was grown from the ground up by director Sarah Gavron in drama workshops and youth hubs in the English capital, and the result is a film that doesn’t just show us its characters’ lives but really sees them, with a clarity, wit and compassion that makes your cheeks gleam. The life at its centre is led by Shola – Rocks is her nickname – a 15-year-old schoolgirl whose beleaguered mother does a bunk one morning, leaving her to fend for herself and her younger brother Emmanuel (D’angelou Osei Kissiedu) in their Hackney apartment.
The outlook is trying, but somehow also the opposite of bleak. Writers Theresa Ikoko and Claire
Wilson are less interested in offering a woe-is-her, grown-up perspective on Shola’s plight than putting us right alongside her, to show how much she’s able to accomplish through her own resourcefulness and nerve, with little more to rely on than a precociously level head. It also helps that she has a supportive group of friends, whose personalities are just as wide-ranging as their ethnic backgrounds. Among them are the drily hilarious Sumaya (Kosar Ali), whose Somali household is caught up in a seemingly endless engagement party, newcomer Roshé (Shaneighamonik Greyson), who quickly picks up the nickname “Ferrero”, and Sabina (Anastasia Dymitrow), a Polish gipsy girl who confides in the group one lunchtime that her grandparents were murdered at Auschwitz. “Hitler,” a friend tuts in sympathy. “Man needs to fix up.”
Whether the scene is one of freewheeling small talk or something rawer and more wrenching, Gavron and her cinematographer Hélène Louvart tune the camera into every last telling detail. The result is not just social realism, but a kind of drama that seems to grow and blossom out of documentary.
Gavron and her casting director Lucy Pardee have assembled a truly extraordinary group of first-time performers, who seem incapable of striking a false note between them, regardless of the story’s dips and swerves. The end result is a film that reckons with – and in the end, celebrates – youthful potential itself, and its extraordinary ability to flower in even the most unpromising soil. For Shola, even getting to the end of the day can feel like a test of endurance. But you’re left with the thrilling suspicion that tomorrow belongs to her.
In UK cinemas from today