Steve: a ‘gripping’ drama starring Cillian Murphy

After his Oscar-winning performance in “Oppenheimer”, Cillian Murphy could have been forgiven for settling into a career as a Hollywood leading man, said Wendy Ide in The Observer. Instead, he has opted to appear in a string of bold indie films, the latest of which is “Steve”, a “gripping and exhausting” drama set on a single day in 1996, and adapted by Max Porter from his own novella.

Murphy plays Steve, the dedicated but frazzled head teacher at “a last-chance” boarding school for “delinquent, damaged teenage boys” in rural England. Steve is battling personal demons, and at work setbacks pile up “on top of disasters”: for starters, a news crew has arrived to shoot a local-interest segment, which has made the boys even harder to control than usual.

To make matters worse, a pompous Tory MP (Roger Allam) has popped in for a photo op. When Steve learns that the council plans to close the school down within six months, events spiral into chaos. “A work of some integrity”, said Donald Clarke in The Irish Times, the film aims to show “how society deals with young men on the brink of social exclusion”. But while its agitated camerawork and overlapping dialogue are no doubt designed to communicate “the challenge of too few people” trying to solve too many problems, it ends up dividing the viewer’s attention, making the characters “come across as mere sketches”.

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Yet the cast is outstanding, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. Tracey Ullman turns up as the deputy head; Jay Lycurgo is superb as a particularly troubled student; and Murphy delivers one of his most “uninhibited and demonstrative” performances to date. Suffused with “gonzo energy” and moments of “bizarre black humour”, “Steve” is an impressive effort.