This painful British drama part-fictionalises the life of Paul Connolly, abandoned in a dustbin as a two-week-old baby and then later abused at the notorious St Leonard’s children’s home in Essex. The effects of childhood brutality and the cost of growing up being told you’re nothing: it’s all there in This Is England actor Michael Socha’s performance as Connolly in adulthood, a violent man carrying invisible scars.
We first meet Connolly as a child of about 11 or 12 (played by newcomer Mitchell Norman). “You’ll end up in prison,” screams one of his carers. This is Bill Starling, who was jailed for 14 years in 2001 for a string of sexual assaults and rapes against children – his youngest victim was just five. We watch a night-time raid on a dorm by paedophile staff, grabbing boys out of their beds “for a bit of fun”. The film isn’t particularly graphic; it doesn’t have to be. Shots of skinny, pale, underfed boys with their shrinking, defeated body language do the job. Connolly spent 12 years living at St Leonard’s. He was never raped but suffered beatings.
Socha plays Connolly in his 20s, not long out of prison and working as a bouncer and hired thug. The turning point comes when he falls for a policewoman, Anthea (Zoë Tapper) and gets a knock at the door from detectives investigating abuse at St Leonard’s.
In real life Connolly never went to prison. He was a boxer, then a gym instructor and became one of the first celebrity personal trainers (working as an adviser on Elle Macpherson’s exercise video The Body). After learning to read at 25, he wrote and self-published a bestselling memoir. At points watching the film, it felt a shame to turn his incredible life achievements into what in the end looks like a fairly conventional gritty British crime drama.
• Big Boys Don’t Cry is released on 5 September in cinemas and on DVD, and on 7 October on digital platforms.
