If film and television are any indication—be it The Teacher’s Lounge and Playground or Armand and Netflix’s Adolescence—schools are now veritable battlegrounds where harried teachers, uncooperative administrators, dysfunctional kids, and intrusive parents and outsiders are at constant odds.
Add to that burgeoning subgenre Steve, the second consecutive collaboration between director Tim Mielants and star Cillian Murphy. For their follow-up to last year’s superb Small Things Like These, the duo sticks to harrowing material, immersing themselves in an institute for troubled teens that makes One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’s psych ward look like a kindergarten class at naptime.
A frenzied plea for compassion and a stirring tribute to the men and women who sacrifice their lives, and sanity, for those in need, it’s an intense drama that lives up to its protagonist’s assessment that “it’s all f—ed.”
Premiering at the Toronto International Film festival ahead of its Oct. 3 debut on Netflix, Steve (written by Max Porter, adapting his 2023 novella Shy) concerns a rural British reform college where Steve (Murphy) and his colleagues struggle to keep their all-male students on the straight and narrow—or, more realistically, to prevent them from going off the deep end and destroying themselves and everyone around them.
On his drive to work, Steve spots Shy (Jay Lycurgo) smoking a joint and dancing in a field to the drum-and-bass blaring through his Walkman’s headphones (an initial tip-off that it’s the ’90s). When he asks Shy how he feels, the young man replies, “Barbwire and slippy,” after which Steve, remembering that a camera crew is arriving that morning, races to the school to make sure things haven’t already gone haywire.
They haven’t, although it’s certainly anarchic from the second Steve walks through the front door. Greeted by a TV journalist (Priyanga Burford) as “the famous Steve,” he’s immediately swarmed by the rest of his charges and forced to break up a slam-bang fight between Jamie (Luke Ayres) and Riley (Joshua J Parker), the latter of whom is so caught up in the heat of the moment that he almost punches the educator. Steve handles this quarrel with a laid-back combination of sternness and compassion, never raising his voice and maintaining a steady disposition, thereby illustrating the reason for his renowned reputation.
Steve’s ability to keep cool for even a minute is impressive considering the insanity of his place of employment, a retrofitted castle that’s lacking in resources but not noise and commotion. With scant warning, the film routinely explodes, with adolescents racing around the halls, smashing furniture, and, in a funny bit of mischief, making wildly profane gestures for the television production’s amusement.
The kids, Steve, and his colleagues—veteran Amanda (Tracy Ullman) and newbie Shola (Simbi Ajikawo)—are being featured in a brief news segment, and they’ve agreed to sit down for one-on-one interviews in which they’re asked to describe themselves in three words and imagine what they’d tell their six-years-younger selves (but not, crucially, to discuss their difficult pasts).
In the first clip from these VHS-recorded chats, a frazzled Steve can barely compose himself, his eyes on the verge of tears. No respite is forthcoming for the teacher, who’s deluged with crises, from Tyrone (Tut Nyuot) and Shy separately lashing out at their therapist (Emily Watson), to Jamie and Riley declining to reconcile, to a meeting with government consultants which ends in horrific news: in six months, the school will be unceremoniously shut down, putting the staff out of work and leaving the students with nowhere to go.
Steve regularly notes the time in order to illustrate just how much mayhem is packed into its main character’s day, and cinematographer Robrecht Heyvaert’s camera runs, glides, rotates, and tilts in tune with him, attuning itself to his hyperactive physical and mental state. That up-close-and-personal perspective can be exhausting, and it takes a good half-hour to adjust to the tumult.
A diverse stew of electronica, heavy metal, and orchestral compositions boost the helter-skelter atmosphere, and that’s before the pressure mounts to a degree that Steve can’t bear on his own. Sneaking off to the laundry room, he procures a hidden bottle of hydrocodone that he mixes with pills. By the conclusion of his shift, he also steals away to the basement where a bottle of wine affords him a small measure of relief—and a chance to temporarily freak out and curse at his reflection.
Murphy is the nucleus of this living, breathing, raging educational organism, veering between tranquility and fury, hope and despair, lucidity and pandemonium with breathtaking finesse. His Steve is remarkably adept at getting through to these teens with kind but firm straight-talk, and yet he’s simultaneously all over the place, scattered and overwhelmed to the point that he’s recording tutorials for recently hired Shola on a tape recorder so she can listen to them later.
His first-rate performance straddles the line between order and disorder, and he’s well paired with Ullman and Lycurgo, whose Shy is, unbeknownst to his teachers (who are too overwhelmed to be on top of everything), dealing with the news that his mother and stepfather are cutting off all communication with him.
Mielants’ turbulent direction reflects his hyper-volatile subjects, who in an instant lurch from playful and sweet to confrontational and scary—not to mention funny, as when Shy badmouths a condescending politician (Roger Allam).
In the film’s last act, its style becomes both more florid—peaking with a showstopping drone shot that travels in, out, and around the school—and more poised. Steve beautifully visualizes the notion that Steve and Shy are drowning under the weight of their grief and stress, and its closing passages are equally confident and poignant.
Refusing to succumb to hopelessness by giving up on the boys (or dismissing them as irredeemable garbage), Steve memorializes their decency and worth, as well as Shy’s “generous pain.” “Hold tight” he declares to the kids, his colleagues and, also, to himself.
A return to the outside world brings with it a different set of (related) responsibilities, and with a final delicate touch, the director suggests that the ascent out of chaos is long and agonizing, if ultimately worth the yeoman’s effort.
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