Rocks review: a wildly charming celebration of teen potential
Dir: Sarah Gavron. Starring: Bukky Bakray, Kosar Ali, D’angelou Sei Kissiedu, Shaneigha-Monik Greyson, Ruby Stokes, Tawheda Begum, Afi Okaidja. 12A cert, 93 mins
From the East End rooftop where Shola (Bukky Bakray) and her friends are killing time, the glassy London skyline looks like a clump of giant exotic mushrooms in the distance. It surely can’t be the same place this spirited band of teenage girls call home – a clutter of classrooms and street markets and shoebox-stack housing estates.
Rocks is a film about that city, and particularly its hardy young female inhabitants: it’s a wildly charming street-level celebration of modern teenage wit and resilience. The most resilient of the lot is Shola herself – Rocks is her nickname – a Year 11 schoolgirl who is left to fend for herself and her younger brother Emmanuel (D’angelou Sei Kissiedu) after her mother disappears, leaving just a hastily scribbled promise to return just as soon as she’s cleared her head.
The outlook is trying, but some way short of bleak. Director Sarah Gavron, whose previous film was the rousing period piece Suffragette, has no interest in bludgeoning her audience with a cautionary tale. Rather, the film seems quietly proud of just how much this Year 11 pupil is able to get done, with little more to rely on than her own precociously level head.
It also helps that she has a friendship group whose personalities are just as distinctive as their ethnic backgrounds, including the drily hilarious Sumaya (Kosar Ali), whose Somali household is hosting a seemingly endless engagement party, to Sabina (Anastasia Dymitrow), a Polish gypsy girl who confides in the group one lunchtime that her grandparents were murdered at Auschwitz.
“Hitler,” tuts another pal in sympathy. “Man needs to fix up.” Writers Theresa Ikoko and Claire Wilson workshopped the funny and emotionally astute script with a group of young Londoners, and its authenticity shines like cartoon treasure.
With its fidelity to reality and unobtrusive (though often beautiful) handheld camerawork, Rocks smacks of social-realism. But its vibrancy and spirit are closer to Shane Meadows than Ken Loach, and perhaps closer still to Céline Sciamma’s 2014 film Girlhood, which wove a similar tale of young female friendship in the Parisian banlieues.
Even for this long-term Londoner, the film’s kaleidoscopic cultural outlook sometimes takes you aback – one youngster proudly describes himself as “Chinese-Jamaican-Ukrainian English” – but that spotlighting of diversity, which under other circumstances might have come over as right-on lip-service, feels positively joyous thanks to the brilliant group of young first-time actresses Gavron and her casting director Lucy Pardee have assembled.
Bakray, who’s 16, navigates some incredibly tricky emotional scenes with delicacy and conviction, grasping that Shola’s pride is both her greatest strength and Achilles’ heel. Her friends, meanwhile, are a delight to spend time with, even when they’re throwing pancake batter at each other during home economics. There is a wonderful sequence in which the gang take a day trip to Hastings, and one suspiciously likens the coastal town to the white middle-class enclave from the horror film Get Out.
There is no Sunken Place treachery here, though: no boo-able villains or sharp-elbowed polemic to contend with as Shola’s path towards adulthood unrolls. Rocks is a film about youthful potential and the miracle of watching it flower in unpropitious soil. It’s a pleasure to behold.
Rocks screened as part of the London Film Festival and will be released in UK cinemas in the spring
