Red, White and Blue

Steve McQueen’s Red, White and Blue, which is part of his Small Axe anthol­o­gy series, con­firms its bril­liance at the very moment it cuts to black and its first end cred­it appears. That’s not to say the dra­ma which pre­cedes this shock cur­tain-drop fails to make a robust case for that already.

It’s more that, when the direc­tor and co-writer (along with Court­tia New­land) choos­es to drop a hard punc­tu­a­tion point, it sud­den­ly aug­ments and com­pli­cates the story’s themes with­out over­stat­ing them, or par­lay­ing them into a cli­max that deliv­ers a pro­sa­ic answer or state­ment. What remains unspo­ken, unre­solved and unknown from the moment we abrupt­ly depart from the lives on-screen is what imbues this film with its rich­ness, and a sense of melan­choly that, we under­stand, is grad­u­al­ly being sub­sumed by rage.

If you’re Black and grow­ing up in Lon­don dur­ing the 1960s, you live with the gen­er­a­tional tru­ism that the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Police is a racist insti­tu­tion. A young Black boy named Leroy Logan, a pic­ture of schol­ar­ly inno­cence, is accost­ed on the street by a pair of overzeal­ous white beat bob­bies. His father, Ken­neth (Steve Tou­s­saint), arrives before this unnec­es­sary stop and search esca­lates beyond rea­son, and snatch­es his son away to safety.

In the car ride home, he deliv­ers a lec­ture in thick Jamaican patois on his extreme dis­taste for the police, sug­gest­ing some kind of for­ma­tive run-in which is nev­er con­firmed. Flash for­ward to the mid-’80s, and a grown, bulked-up and beard­ed Leroy (a thrilling, pow­der-keg per­for­mance by John Boye­ga) is con­sid­er­ing join­ing the force. It’s a deci­sion which is fast-tracked in his mind when his father is bru­talised by two white officers.

Leroy fer­vent­ly believes that this cor­rupt insti­tu­tion can only be over­hauled from the inside, and so he heads to basic train­ing with the inten­tion of cor­rect­ing the cor­rec­tors – albeit with frank diplo­ma­cy and charm rather than tit-for-tat vio­lence. He hopes that his mere pres­ence will help to nor­malise big­ot­ed atti­tudes inside the rot­ten ranks, and that it may also help to con­vince the dyed-in-the-wool xeno­phobes (who are plen­ti­ful) to avert their accusato­ry gaze from those with skin a dif­fer­ent colour to their own. Yet his dis­en­chant­ment arrives far soon­er than expect­ed when he begins to com­pre­hend the futil­i­ty of his task.

For the most part this is Boyega’s show, and he just nails scene after scene after scene. His numer­ous emo­tion­al flame-outs are root­ed in a sense of dashed right­eous­ness, mak­ing the inten­si­ty of his anger occa­sion­al­ly tough to stom­ach. The poten­tial for hair-trig­ger vio­lence is always there, but he also tem­pers this brash­er aspect of the per­for­mance with a louch­eness and gen­tle­ness that presents a char­ac­ter of depth, tex­ture and hard-edged human­i­ty. His strained rela­tion­ship with his father is even­tu­al­ly revealed as the film’s moral arc.

And what a time to make a film about racial­ly-moti­vat­ed police cor­rup­tion. It’s hard to think of a more reflec­tive and can­did­ly philo­soph­i­cal film for this moment of wide­spread malaise, dis­trust and dark­ness. The con­vinc­ing, eco­nom­i­cal plot machi­na­tions com­bine to build a con­vinc­ing argu­ment as to why the boil of sys­temic racism with­in any pro­fes­sion­al insti­tu­tion can­not sim­ply be lanced – the entire body needs to die and be com­plete­ly reborn for true change to take hold.