Britain’s Angry Young Filmmaker : Movies: Hanif Kureishi’s ‘London Kills Me’ is Dickensian in its look at England’s troubled youth culture.

As seen in “London Kills Me,” the directorial debut of the critically acclaimed British author Hanif Kureishi, the streets of London are swarming with kids with little hope for the future and nothing to do but pick through the rubble left by 11 years of the Thatcher Administration.

The story of two childhood pals who’ve reached a fork in the road, “London Kills Me” charts the shifting fortunes of Muff, who wants to continue the cheap thrills of life as a drug dealer, and Clint, the film’s central character, who’s desperate to find a respectable pair of shoes so he can go straight and get a job as a waiter.

Set against the backdrop of the British rave scene of homeless kids who live in abandoned buildings, hustle drugs and sex, and fritter away their unlimited free time dancing to blasting music at orgiastic parties, the film is in a larger sense a study of cultural collapse and of what happens when a society stops caring about its less advantaged members.

“I basically wanted to make a film about kids on the street with nothing,” says Kureishi, speaking by phone from London where he’s recuperating from the back surgery that forced him to cancel a planned trip to America to promote the film. “I worry about how it will do in America too, because it’s quite a gentle film. In America drugs are a heavy-duty business with people running around with guns and millions of dollars, but it’s not like that in England--which isn’t to say life isn’t rough for kids living on the streets in London.

“This generation differs from the youth culture of the ‘60s and ‘70s in that these kids are not middle class and they’re not students,” he continues. “Many of them are heavily involved in drugs, prostitution and dealing, and they tend to be unemployed and badly educated. There was an idealism to the youth culture of the ‘60s and ‘70s, but these kids don’t believe they’re going to change anything and aren’t interested in making a statement. Thatcherism destroyed any opportunity they might have had. They’ve embraced the hedonism of the ‘70s but have none of the optimism of that time.”

Opening last Friday to mixed reviews, the film was shot in seven weeks on location in West London for $2.4 million, and stars 23-year-old actor Justin Chadwick as Clint, the teen-age dealer in pursuit of a pair of shoes. Though Chadwick began acting onstage when he was 15, “London Kills Me” marks his film debut, and was additionally challenging in that he had little knowledge of the world the film depicts.

“I grew up in Northern England where raves are quite big, but I wasn’t familiar with this world, so to prepare for the part I moved to the Portobello Road, which is the center of this scene,” says Chadwick. “(The drug) Ecstasy was burning every ounce of flesh off the kids I saw there and they were all really skinny, so I lost 35 pounds in order to make my character more realistic, and spent as much time as I could hanging out with these kids. When we were filming I’d often come to the set with ideas based on things I’d seen or heard on the streets. Hanif was receptive to what I had to say and wrote a lot of my ideas into the story.”

Nominated for an Academy Award in 1987 for his first screenplay, for the Stephen Frears film “My Beautiful Laundrette,” the 37-year-old Kureishi is acknowledged as the leading British author of his generation. An angry young man of letters who picks up where Joe Orton and Colin McInnes left off, Kureishi cites the British pop groups of the ‘60s as his central influence, and his writing grows out of the streets rather than British academia.

Born in London to an English mother and a Pakistani father, he writes with unusual candor about British youth culture, which is largely shaped by popular music, the class system, race, drugs and the quest for sexual identity--themes that are central to his debut novel of 1990, “The Buddha of Suburbia,” which is currently being adapted for presentation by the BBC as a four-part miniseries.

Kureishi’s work is evocative of Dickens in its complex interweaving of multiple characters and plot lines, but it burns with the fresh, reckless energy of the young, and is absolutely of the moment in its pop references.

“I was made by pop music in a way I certainly wasn’t by literature, and when I was growing up my heroes were the Stones, the Beatles, the Kinks and the Who,” he says. “Like me, they were suburban, lower middle-class kids and they managed to rise above the world they were born into. They created a whole vocabulary and outlook on life that was critically important to me, along with millions of other British kids.

“Pop culture has a power in England that it doesn’t have in America,” he adds, “and that may be because America is a country of immigrants and there’s an intense work ethic bred into your country. The idea that one can improve one’s life isn’t so prevalent in England and one certainly doesn’t find it among the young people there. England is a country of little opportunity, but that means kids have lots of free time to dress up, hang around the streets, form bands and take drugs.”

As did Gus Vant Zant with his 1991 film, “My Own Private Idaho,” Kureishi takes no moral position on the subject of drugs and presents them as neither good or bad--they’re simply a central element in the life style he’s examining.

“Drugs are dangerous and taking them is like playing with guns,” he says, “but I’ve always loved taking drugs so it would be wrong of me to say I thought they were bad. Moreover, I’ve noticed that lots of people in the film industry are stoned out of their heads a good deal of the time so it’s ridiculous for films to take a moralistic tone on this subject.”

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Though some viewers might make the case that drugs are the major stumbling block in the lives of the kids in Kureishi’s film, their dead-end existence is actually more a result of the class system, which is seen in one form or another in all Kureishi’s work.

“If you write stories about Venice, Italy, they have to involve water, and if you write about England you have to address the class system because it completely permeates life here,” he says. “As George Orwell said, ‘People in England are branded on the tongue,’ and the way you speak immediately identifies you in terms of class, which is still a hugely powerful form of discrimination. Pop culture enables some people to break through class barriers, and in the ‘60s it gave us hope that this system could be dismantled, but unfortunately that hasn’t happened.”

Kureishi himself is a member of one of the most persecuted minorities in England, the Asian community, which is prominently featured in his writing. “Paki-bashing” is a popular pastime among British skinheads, and it’s something he’s had firsthand experience with.

“I experienced racism and violence every day of my life when I was growing up,” he recalls. “My earliest memory is being abused at school and going home and telling my parents that people had been rude to me about my color.” When one comments that he handles the subject of race with an amazing lack of bitterness, he says, “It didn’t make me bitter because writing is a sort of magic that converts pain into art. That was always my advantage, that I could withdraw and re-create the world how I wanted it to be as a writer.”

This was a discovery made early on by Kureishi, who began writing at the age of 14 and completed three novels while still in his teens. After graduating from high school, Kureishi enrolled as a philosophy major at King’s College in London, where he became caught up in the punk scene, while continuing to write. During this period, however, his interest shifted from novels to playwriting and he soon found himself writer-in-residence at the Royal Court Theater. That in turn led to his trying his hand at screenplays in 1984, which led to the films “My Beautiful Laundrette” and “Sammy and Rosie Get Laid,” both directed by Frears. The next step was for Kureishi to direct his own material--a leap that he found took a bit of adjusting to.

“The writer in me kept wanting to tinker with the story as we went along, but when you’re directing there are too many things to deal with to do rewrites,” he says. “With movies you have to make decisions immediately and your creativity is hugely constrained by the circumstances you find yourself in--the weather, the light, traffic, people in the street who are hassling you--there are a million variables to deal with. The biggest adjustment for me, however, was getting used to the fact that there are so many bloody people around you all the time!”

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Though he says he came to enjoy that aspect of filmmaking, he still considers himself a writer first.

“I’m working on the BBC adaptation of ‘The Buddha of Suburbia’ right now, and I get quite a few offers of various sorts, but I’m doing my best to avoid working. I hope ‘London Kills Me’ doesn’t result in a deluge of film offers because then I’ll have to read scripts and talk to agents and that’s a waste of time.”

His own work may be about to make a radical shift in direction, as Kureishi finds himself drifting away from the two things that have thus far provided him with the bulk of his material; youth culture and England’s Asian community. “ ‘London Kills Me’ is a film about young people and I’ll soon be too old to live in that world revolving around style and music and clothes--and that’s all right,” he says, “because at the moment I’ve pretty much exhausted my interest in that world.

“When you start to become known as a writer it’s easy to become isolated from the world and that’s happened to me in a way,” he adds. “This is especially true of my relationship with Asian life in England--in the last few years I’ve become increasingly removed from that world and I don’t know those people anymore. I’ve never considered leaving England because I was fascinated by what was happening here, especially in the ‘80s, but now for the first time I’m thinking about going somewhere else.

“I’ve been writing since I was 14 but I’ve never given much thought to what I was supposed to be doing as a writer or where I was going. I just wrote naturally about what I saw in front of me--young people, sexual relationships, drug-taking, school, race, parents--but somehow I feel I can’t really do that anymore. So while I’m taking time off to recover from my operation I’m giving a lot of thought to what I’m gonna do next as a writer.”