There is a critical moment in the film Blue Story when a grief-stricken youth challenges his fellow gang member for provoking a confrontation that has led to the fatal shooting of their best friend. He shouts in his face: “Where has this [violence] got you?” It is an attempt to hit the pause button and inject rationality into a totally mad situation where one group of disenfranchised black teenagers from Peckham are at war with another group of similarly disenfranchised black teenagers from Deptford. Over nothing. And because the gang member cannot face the question put to him and has no answer, he pulls out a gun and threatens to shoot his friend in the head.
This tense interaction took me back to an encounter I had four years ago when I went to live on the then-troubled Angell Town estate in Brixton as part of our investigation into gang violence, The Estate We’re In.
Late one night, my host and I were visited by three gang members known to my host and I asked them: “What is the point of attacking poor young people like yourselves just because they live in another postcode?”
As in the film, the young men looked stupefied and had no answer. “I know it sound silly but we don’t get along, it’s just what happens,” one said. The next night, their friend, who lived in the adjacent street, was shot over a petty argument and these very same boys would rush him to hospital where he died a few hours later. In the days that followed, the boys shut down emotionally. Everybody was hurting but nobody was asking: “Where has this violence got us?”
For 10 years, I have been posing these sorts of questions to gang members in an attempt to challenge their logic and convey their reality to the wider world, but I rarely felt I got through to the gang members themselves. One reason was this: gang members do not respond to written stories because they do not read newspapers.
But gang members do watch films. And that is why the furore over the Vue chain of cinemas’ decision to reinstate Blue Story — after pulling it from 100 cinemas due to a mass brawl at a movie-house in Birmingham and sparking “disturbances” at 15 other cinemas UK-wide — has wider public health implications.
But the first-time director of Blue Story, Andrew Onwubolu, aka music artist Rapman, this week questioned Vue’s “hidden” motives for pulling the film. “Is there a colour thing?” he asked. Vue said their decision was “categorically not” based on race or “concern about the content of the film itself”.
But critics of Vue point out that when 12 people were killed during a shooting at a screening of The Dark Knight Rises at a different cinema chain in America in 2012, it was accepted that the gunman was to blame, not Batman, and there was no attempt to pull the movie from screens.
And others have made the point that the brawl in Birmingham appears to have had nothing to do with the film and was sparked by people who had not even been to the movie. Onwubolu argued that Vue’s rush to blame his film for inciting violence might rather be linked to “hidden” concerns over the clientele. He asked pointedly: “Does the owner of Vue believe that this film brings a certain type?”
There is no doubt that this “type” —young people whose lives are so accurately depicted in Blue Story — are flocking to see it, with some telling the Evening Standard they have seen it “two or three times”. Despite Vue’s clear discomfort — they say they are laying on “additional security measures” when it reopens at their cinemas on the weekend — this is exactly the demographic Onwubolu is seeking to reach.
Blue Story begins with Timmy (played by Stephen Odubola) from Peckham in Southwark, SE15, putting on his new school tie and preparing to be sent to a better school in another borough, Lewisham, SE13, where he will meet Marco (Micheal Ward) and become best friends. But the move out of borough brings the friends into contact with swirling rivalries not of their making and involving older siblings.
What starts with kids innocently larking about in the playground and boys expressing excitement about talking to girls escalates with frightening speed into a series of devastating tit-for-tat shootings and stabbings. Onwubolu resists the temptation to be sensational, sticking to a realistic script and is brilliant at capturing the seductiveness of the street lifestyle and the hyper-masculine but fragile egos at play.
His pitch-perfect use of the vernacular sucks you into their reality and drew laughs from the young people who dominated the audience I was part of at Cineworld in Wood Green, north London, and who recognised the roadman slang as their own. It’s also a language that makes you viscerally feel the violence as it’s spat out — such as frequent threats to “wet you up” (stab you) — but the audience was also alive to the vulnerability of the protagonists and every time violence was meted out, it drew audible and sympathetic responses for the victims. (There was, I should add, not a hint of trouble and it amounted to a totally normal cinema-going experience.)
Another pertinent theme explored by the film is the misogyny and power imbalance that pervades boy-girl relationships in and around the fringes of gangs. Early on, a gang member sits with his “brethren” on a clapped-out sofa under a bridge on an estate and texts a girl to “send me a pic of you in your birthday suit”, only to show all his leering mates when she apparently sends him something to his liking. And when Timmy talks about Leah, a girl he fancies, and says “I don’t want sex, I just want her,” his friends fall about in wild, derisive laughter and shout: “You’re so gay.”
Interestingly, the police are portrayed, perhaps somewhat one-dimensionally, as useless bystanders always arriving too late to impact outcomes and prevent the body count from rising.
Parents, too, are largely absent. Neither boy has a father at home and the mothers are working two jobs to make ends meet. We see the mother of Marco and his older brother Switcher being wilfully blind to the extent of their involvement in violence and treating them like victims when Switcher is in fact one of the ringleaders, as well as a terrible influence on Marco, whom she singularly fails to protect. But it’s a difficult line to draw and Onwubolu slightly fudges it, depicting the mothers as victims but also, in his rapper narrative that acts as a sort of meta-commentary, observing that “parents and police need to up their game”.
Ultimately though, the power of the film lies in its ability to make young people address the overriding question that drives this film: “Where has this got you?” It’s a cry in the dark that goes unheeded when the anguished gang member first asks it, but it is the question that everyone watching the film is left with.
As you are drawn into the lives of the protagonists, the consequences of their choices become starkly apparent to the viewer in a way that they never are to those in the thick of it. It’s this distance of the observer from the subject that the film offers its target audience.
And that, surely, is the power of Blue Story. Even as we watch the next generation of “youngers” tooling up and preparing to “wet up” their “pagans” [enemies], we feel punched in the guts by the sheer pent-up, ego-driven, mindlessness of it all. As Rapman laments: “Ain’t no winners when you playing with guns”.
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