MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Rebels’: Manifesto of British Radicalism

Most movies are about so many of the same old things that the low-budget British film “Young Soul Rebels,” directed by the young black director Isaac Julien, has at least the fascination of novelty.

Set in 1977 during the week of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee, it’s about Chris and Caz, black disc jockeys and lifelong friends who run their own pirate “funk” radio station, Soul Patrol, out of an East End garage. Chris (Valentine Nonyela), his white mother (Frances Barber) and his sister (Danielle Scillitoe) live in a housing project infiltrated by skinheads. Caz (Mo Sesay), who is defiantly homosexual, has a free-wheeling sense of himself.

When Chris attempts to move them into a mainstream commercial radio station, the inevitable falling out mirrors the disruptions caused by the punks and socialists and right-wing extremists during the Jubilee.

It also parallels the film’s weakest device--which, alas, is also the central plot device. The movie opens with the murder of a black man, a friend of both Chris and Caz, by an unidentified white homosexual pick-up. Throughout, we’re treated to tantalizing tip-offs as to the murderer’s identity, but the impending revelation has little urgency. The whole thing registers like a sop to the audience--an opportunity to give the film’s free-form radicalism a B-movie tingle.

That radicalism comes through despite Julien’s rather lackluster filmmaking skills. (He’s been directing features since 1983 and is one of four co-founders of a collective of black filmmakers) “Young Soul Rebels” (selected theaters) is best when Julien lets the actors, who are of varying ability but winningly game, cut loose.

There’s a well-staged scene in an underground dance club called The Crypt where all sexes and persuasions seem to jam together in a fervid welter of funk; and there are delicate grace notes, too, like the scene where Chris’ mother cadges a joint off her son.

There are also a number of explicit sex scenes in this Times-rated Mature movie that are integral to the film’s mood of political manifesto. Sexual radicalism, particularly homosexual radicalism, is presented without apology or subterfuge, and its very openness connects up with the disruptions in a society on the verge of Thatcherism.

In Stephen Frears’ “My Beautiful Laundrette” and “Sammy and Rosie Get Laid,” the interracial homosexual couplings had a similar charge, but Frears and his screenwriter Hanif Kureishi worked on a far broader human canvas. “Young Soul Rebels” strains for the scope of those films without possessing their fire. It never really moves beyond what first attracts us--its novelty.

‘Young Soul Rebels’

Valentine Nonyela Chris

Mo Sesay Caz

Frances Barber Ann

Sophie Okonedo Tracy

A Prestige presentation. Director Isaac Julien. Producer Nadine Marsh-Edwards. Executive producers Colin MacCabe. Screenplay by Paul Hallam, Derrick Saldaan McClintock. Cinematographer Nina Kellgren. Editor John Wilson. Costumes Annie Curtis Jones. Production design Derek Brown. 1 hour, 43 minutes.

Times rated Mature for sex and drug use.