Jaw­bone

Great box­ing movies are often sto­ries of bro­ken dreams, missed oppor­tu­ni­ties and the long road back to redemp­tion, and Jaw­bone adheres to this clas­sic tem­plate. An ama­teur cham­pi­on at 16, Jim­my McCabe (John­ny Har­ris) coul­da been a con­tender, he coul­da been some­body, instead of being, ​“just anoth­er bor­ing drunk who had it all in the palm of his hand and pissed it up against a wall,” as his train­er Eddie blunt­ly puts it.

When we’re intro­duced to Jim­my he is at his low­est ebb. Home­less after being evict­ed from his flat, he spends his nights drink­ing by the Thames, gaz­ing into the deep waters. The despair­ing look in his eyes sug­gests he has con­sid­ered jump­ing in more than once.

We shouldn’t be sur­prised that Har­ris con­veys Jimmy’s pain with such sear­ing authen­tic­i­ty. He has often been capa­ble of find­ing a note of sad­ness or vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty in even his most despi­ca­ble char­ac­ters – think of his vivid turn as a pimp in Lon­don to Brighton – and here he has the added ben­e­fit of know­ing exact­ly what his char­ac­ter is going through.

Har­ris wrote Jaw­bone based on his own expe­ri­ences, and the film’s most res­o­nant moments cap­ture inti­mate details of the alcoholic’s plight: wak­ing up bleary-eyed and in need of a sus­tain­ing drink; striv­ing to hide his des­per­a­tion behind a brave pub­lic face; expe­ri­enc­ing a deep flush of shame as he tells lies to cov­er his tracks.

Direc­tor Thomas Nap­per likes to get uncom­fort­ably close to Jim­my or frame him in a way that empha­sis­es his iso­la­tion, and we often see him alone at night, wan­der­ing the dark emp­ty streets as he tries to keep his demons at bay.

Although Ian McShane slith­ers by for an oleagi­nous one-scene cameo, Jaw­bone is pri­mar­i­ly a film about the rela­tion­ship between three men. Like Michael Smiley’s Eddie, gym own­er Bill (Ray Win­stone) looks at Jim­my with a mix­ture of anger, dis­ap­point­ment and pater­nal affec­tion. He has ded­i­cat­ed his life to help­ing young boys get off the streets, push­ing them to make some­thing of them­selves, and through Winstone’s ten­der per­for­mance we under­stand how Jimmy’s con­tin­ued laps­es have wound­ed him deeply. Win­stone and Har­ris share a scene halfway through the film that is both unex­pect­ed and mov­ing, with the emo­tion­al impact being ampli­fied by the skil­ful under­play­ing of both actors.

Jaw­bone is an impres­sive and pow­er­ful film about alco­holism, and a pret­ty good one about box­ing. The nar­ra­tive devel­ops towards a final unli­censed fight that Jim­my hopes will dig him out of a finan­cial hole, and the film­mak­ers make an effort to min­imise the num­ber of stan­dard train­ing mon­tages and famil­iar sto­ry beats as he grad­u­al­ly rebuilds him­self. When this bout does final­ly come around, Nap­per and his cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Tat Rad­cliffe put us inside the ring, get­ting their cam­eras as close as pos­si­ble to the two slug­gers and cap­tur­ing the impact of their blows.

It’s intense and fre­net­ic, but it’s also strange­ly anti-cli­mac­tic, which seems to be the point. Jaw­bone is a film about a man who knows that his real fight will begin the moment he steps out­side the ring, and when he final­ly faces up to that fact in the film’s shat­ter­ing final scene it feels like a big­ger vic­to­ry than any he could have man­aged with his gloves on.