Alex Whea­tle

The fourth instal­ment of Steve McQueen’s Small Axe anthol­o­gy focus­es on the ear­ly years of Brix­ton Bard Alex Whea­tle. Unlike the nar­row biog­ra­phy of Red, White and Blue, Alex Whea­tle sprawls out the first 20 or so years of its subject’s life, flash­ing back from the present where he finds him­self in jail due to his involve­ment in the Brix­ton Upris­ings. The film sees Whea­tle recount­ing his sto­ry to cell­mate Sime­on (Rob­bie Gee), which com­pris­es of his past in a Sur­rey care home and late intro­duc­tion to his Black her­itage in London.

Anchored by a promis­ing per­for­mance from first timer Sheyi Cole, Alex Whea­tle is the first film that feels inex­tri­ca­ble from the anthol­o­gy. At times Alex is comed­ical­ly ​‘green’ – he loud­ly asks to buy weed in the street while smil­ing at pass­ing police offi­cers – and his naivety is accen­tu­at­ed in Cole’s per­for­mance which only works because it’s mech­a­nised by his total iso­la­tion, which we feel acute­ly because of the com­mu­ni­ties por­trayed in pre­vi­ous instalments.

The pres­ence of music is just as promi­nent in this piece, a stand out moment being Alex’s first trip to a record shop, as the cam­era snails at the pace of the slowed down reg­gae track in tra­di­tion­al ​‘love at first sight’ fash­ion. We then jump six months ahead to Alex infat­u­at­ed by the music scene and on a quest to devel­op his own sound and move­ment. The more immersed he becomes in the music scene, the stronger the police presence.

In Alex Whea­tle the police are deper­son­alised, the offi­cers indis­tinct from one anoth­er. Unlike in Man­grove or Red, White and Blue where McQueen allows us to become accus­tomed to par­tic­u­lar faces, here they are sim­ply ​‘The Beast’. Their omnipres­ence and mis­treat­ment of Black peo­ple is indis­tin­guish­able from the behav­iour of the house moth­er at young Alex’s care home.

Anoth­er stand out moment includes the four minute mon­tage of archive pho­tos from the Black People’s Day of Action, set to the spo­ken sec­tions of Lin­ton Kwe­si Johnson’s dub poem ​‘New Crass Mas­sakah’. The New Cross Fire of 1981 saw a house par­ty of Black teenagers dis­rupt­ed by a petrol bomb.Thirteen atten­dees died and 30 were hos­pi­talised. The lack of acknowl­edge­ment by the gov­ern­ment or a thor­ough inves­ti­ga­tion by the police catal­ysed the 20,000-strong march in Jan­u­ary and lat­er the Brix­ton Upris­ings in April. Mene­lik Shabazz beau­ti­ful­ly doc­u­ment­ed the protests in his short 1981 doc­u­men­tary ​‘Blood Ah Go Run’.

This evoca­tive seg­ment adds tex­ture and depth to the film, which at points can feel rushed due to its broad scope and rel­a­tive­ly curt run­time. McQueen being a thor­ough and adept world builder could have allowed for more time to lux­u­ri­ate in a Brix­ton that’s come to pass.

The pur­pose of McQueen includ­ing Wheatle’s sto­ry in this anthol­o­gy is to demon­strate how an insti­tu­tion­alised mind can be unpicked and retaught. In an epi­logue we learn Alex went on to become a nov­el­ist and gained an MBE for ser­vices to lit­er­a­ture. The resound­ing mes­sage of this film – and indeed the anthol­o­gy as a whole – comes from the mouth of Sime­on: ​“If you don’t know your past you won’t know your future.”

While the beau­ti­ful direc­to­r­i­al flour­ish­es are still there – the flu­id cin­e­matog­ra­phy, strik­ing per­for­mances and air­tight sound­track – Alex Whea­tle is the first Small Axe film where the blend between the infor­ma­tive and the point­ed­ly artis­tic feels a lit­tle unsettled.