The first actor to ever win two consecutive Oscars didn’t exactly break the mould to do so.
Spencer Tracy snagged his first trophy for the 1937 sleeper hit Captains Courageous — a Rudyard Kipling adaptation starring Tracy as a questionably accented Portuguese fisherman, forced to care for and educate a belligerent youngster — a youngster who, it turns out, wants and needs nothing more desperately than a velvet-glove father-figure to thrive under.
Then the next year he followed it up with Boys Town — a movie based on a true story about a Catholic priest so self-sacrificing, he founded an entire boarding school (still in operation today) for misbegotten street kids with nowhere else to go.
It was a tale apparently so affecting that in his acceptance speech, Tracy himself claimed the Oscar shouldn’t go to him but to the real-life Father Flanagan — to whom he ended up giving the statue anyway.
So when asking why a movie like Steve exists, or why we might be drawn to watching it, there’s a long track record to pull from — though unlike Boys Town, the new Cillian Murphy flick — having just had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival before an Oct. 3 release on Netflix — isn’t drawn directly from real life.
WATCH | Steve trailer:
Instead, it’s a “reinterpretation” of Max Porter’s novella/prose poem Shy, the evocative, esoteric and at-times just odd book about a teenager at a school for troubled youth.
Dealing with themes of depression and abuse in a layered and experimental text (a documentary being made about the school and Shy’s own violent thoughts and dreams are alternatively represented through contrasting fonts and full-page spreads), Shy already seems like a novel resistant to adaptation. Coupled with the additional changes made by Belgian director Tim Mielants (Small Things Like These, which also starred Murphy) and Porter (onboard as screenwriter), the challenges only seem to mount.
Steve — as its title might suggest — tells the same borstal boy story but from a different angle. Instead of following the eponymous enraged teen stuck at the floridly named Stanton Wood, we now follow its endlessly self-flagellating head.
Here, that’s Cillian Murphy as Steve — a sad-eyed, heart-of-gold headmaster/mentor type simultaneously trying to keep a British publicly funded school for youthful offenders open while frantically trying to avoid a fist in the teeth from any one of them.
That’s made all the more difficult as the aforementioned documentary crew quizzes the kids on their deepest traumas. Their repeated prompt of “Describe yourself in three words” garners responses various enough to forecast the film’s erratic mood — from Riley’s “Cornish legend, hardcore and cheeky” to Shy’s “depressed, angry and bored” to Steve’s simple “very, very tired.”
But as Steve bats away the cameras poking their way through the boys’ dresser drawers, things proceed to fully go off the rails when he gets the news he’s been dreading: Due to ballooning costs and a sinking reputation, Stanton Wood is set to close in six months.
What that means for its pupils — especially Shy, careening headlong into a violent pit of despair and loneliness from which he may never escape — is unfortunately not hard to guess.
In terms of execution, Steve is in league with a veritable ocean of “Angry Boys In Fictional Last Chance Institution” type films, and it makes sense why.
From America’s Bless the Beasts and Children or Short Term 12, U.K.’s Made in Britain or Scum and Canada’s 10-1/2 or Dog Pound, to modern classics like The Holdovers or even Holes, there’s something perpetually irresistible to writers and audiences about this type of character and situation — watching strong-willed (if poorly mannered) youths railing pointlessly against the crushing horror of being alive, instead of submitting to routine and comforting numbness like the rest of us.
Authentic, impressionistic
In that regard, Steve is firing on all cylinders. The cast of disaffected kids who director Mielants came up with put The Breakfast Club to shame, while newcomer Jay Lycurgo’s turn as Shy is heartbreaking in its authenticity. Murphy is no one to shake a stick at either, with his steadfast dedication to the school — paired with an unsteady foundation for his own mental health — grounding the film around them.
But like the novella, Steve is an inherently impressionistic movie. Pseudo-archival documentary footage and talking head interviews are interspersed with shaky cam realism and even a music video-like drone sequence. Perspectives shift wildly from character to character as well, painting a picture more of the school as a place than any one person’s story — or even attempting to tell a traditional story at all.
Even more than its source material, Steve‘s storytelling style is reminiscent of something novelistic; more than a straight plot, it builds the feeling of being a lost boy as confused and scared of your reactions as those you react to. Just like Paul Murray’s Skippy Dies painted the picture of a boarding school tragedy through the interconnecting lives of its many attendees, Steve maps how the many tendrils of trauma can form long and confused branches from long-forgotten moments.
But where that book built its schema over roughly 700 pages, Steve pinballs from terrifying backstory to high school banter to shattered glass and heartache in the space of 90 minutes.
The effect is at times beautiful, though at limited other points lacklustre: The late reveals of Steve’s pathos feel oddly tacked on given how many other narrative balls the film needs to juggle. And the emotionally brutal conclusion to Shy’s arc hits far harder when his story is given our full attention. Simply unpacking it takes up nearly half of the novella; in the film, it’s almost just a slightly maudlin, overwrought afterthought.
But that doesn’t detract from what we came here for, from what makes us return to these stories again and again: the endlessly interesting set-up of young men horrified by the endlessly bleak outlook of real life battering them down, and the well-intentioned but impossible task of explaining how the world ain’t really that bad.
It is probably so interesting because it makes an infinite amount of sense to us: the immeasurable pain and inherent unfairness of it all is not all an illusion. Even though the way to survive is to ignore that, maybe there’s a bit of vicarious thrill in seeing the punk-rock male loneliness personification bust up some windows — or call members of Parliament eminently British cusses right to their faces.
And it is certainly cathartic to watch someone selflessly take on the task of trying to convince them it’s all going to be OK. While it’s a trope so easily and often exploited its likely most widely known as a subject of derision on South Park, it’s still worth returning to when done well. Steve may not be perfect, but none of us are. If we were, we wouldn’t need the movie.
