‘Alex Wheatle’: Film Review

Steve McQueen continues his ‘Small Axe’ anthology about London’s West Indian community with this portrait of the eponymous writer’s formative years during the period of the 1981 Brixton Uprising. Early in Steve McQueen’s Alex Wheatle , the young protagonist whose name gives the film its title prompts derision from a barber shop full of Londoners of West Indian descent by revealing that he doesn’t consider himself African.

“I might be Black, but I’m from Surrey,” says the young Brit abandoned by his Jamaican parents, who has grown up in the loveless Social Services foster-care system. The words of his bibliophile cellmate toward the end of the film come as a direct rebuke to his unformed cultural identity: “Education is the key.

You see, if you don’t know your past then you won’t know your future.” Wheatle, played in his childhood years by Asad-Shareef Muhammad and as a teenager by Sheyi Cole, is the widely translated author of more than 15 novels for young adults, awarded an MBE in 2008 for services to literature. His story of finding a path forward from his troubled beginnings fits satisfyingly within the frame of McQueen’s Small Axe anthology for Amazon and BBC, about […]

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