MOVIE REVIEWS : Street Kids Run Rampant in ‘London Kills Me’

Hanif Kureishi has a voluminous imagination. The movies he has worked on as a screenwriter, “My Beautiful Laundrette” and “Sammy and Rosie Get Laid,” contain enough material for a dozen others, all of them equally interesting. His directorial debut film, “London Kills Me,” continues the multi-movie process: It’s about young street hustlers in West London, each of whom could easily go off and become their own movie. The problem is that, unlike Kureishi’s earlier screen work, the sheer mass of material in “London Kills Me” seems less resounding than scattershot.

At its simplest level, the film (at the Hillcrest Cinemas) is about how Clint (Justin Chadwick), a 20-year-old street hustler who takes his name from Clint Eastwood, attempts to straighten out his life by getting a job at a trendy upscale restaurant. The problem: to get the job, he needs a good pair of shoes.

The business of finding the shoes is pretext for an interlocking series of picaresque escapades with his street gang chums known as “the posse.” Muffdiver (Steven Mackintosh), sullen and ambitious, leads the pack; he spends most of the movie trying to finagle Clint out of going straight. Sylvie (Emer McCourt) is the punk temptress who divides her wayward affections between the two.

Kureishi stages a couple of sequences that are like jamborees. Like Gus Van Sant’s “My Own Private Idaho,” the film suggests how street life can suddenly erupt into a carnival. The posse breaks into an apartment and uses it as a free-style crash pad, decorating the walls with graffiti. Living below them is a Sufi guru, Dr. Bubba (Roshan Seth), who gives meditation classes to upscale Londoners and takes a supernally tolerant view of the posse’s shenanigans. His bemused relationship with them has the effect of softening their edges for us; for all their drug-dealing (mostly Ecstasy and hashish) and self-destructing ways, they have a babes-in-the-woods quality. Kureishi loves these street people; he loves their jumble of emotions, their emotional messiness. It’s a romanticized view but no more romanticized than the radical youth in Godard’s films.

Godard is clearly Kureishi’s great influence in “London Kills Me.” (The R rating is for drug use, language and some nudity.) This was also noticeable in his previous two screenplays, but they were directed by Stephen Frears, whose style is more fluid and vibrant than Godard’s. As a director, Kureishi has some of Godard’s almost abstract dispassion: He unblinkingly views his people as they play out their moods.

The drawback to Kureishi’s style is that nothing sinks in. The posse’s over-theatricalized posturings remain resolutely at the street-theater level. The film has a classic structure: Clint finally gets his shoes. But the posse doesn’t really take hold of our imagination and, unlike Godard’s radicals in a film like “La Chinoise,” they don’t come to represent anything larger. They don’t take on the contours of a generational portrait. This may not have been Kureishi’s point, but perhaps it should have been: “London Kills Me” is too expansive a canvas for such random, squiggly brushwork.

‘London Kills Me’ Justin Chadwick: Clint Steven Mackintosh: Muffdiver Emer McCourt: Sylvie Roshan Seth: Dr. Bubba

A Fine Line Features release. Director Hanif Kureishi. Producer Tim Bevan. Executive producer Graham Bradstreet. Screenplay by Hanif Kureishi. Cinematographer Ed Lachman. Editor Jon Gregory. Costumes Amy Roberts. Music Mark Springer and Sarah Sarhandi. Production design Stuart Walker. Running time: 1 hour, 48 minutes.

MPAA-rated R (drug use, language, sexual situations).