Review: Small Axe: Alex Wheatle (2020)

Many of the films in Steve McQueen’s Small Axe anthology, which charts the lives of West Indians living in London in the 1960s through 1980s, examine the ways that social and personal influences construct a person’s identity. For instance, Red, White and Blue looks at how oppression from the police and stiff upbringing at home leads Leroy Logan to join the Metropolitan Police Service in an attempt to reform it. Alex Wheatle similarly looks at the ways social institutions, racism, and domestic situations impact the formation of a personality and a calling. However, unlike Leroy Logan, Alex Wheatle has no foundation to build upon. He’s adrift in white Britain, a stranger in Black Britain, and seemingly without a home. This short feature is about the process of him building a home for himself.

The film starts with Alex in prison. We don’t know why he’s serving time, but soon enough, McQueen jumps back to his childhood and catches us up to the present, which eventually involves the Brixton riot of 1981, where Alex is arrested. Alex is a boy with West Indian roots, but he’s been raised in foster care, having been abandoned at an orphanage by his parents. He’s abused by his white foster mother in Surrey before moving to a hostel in predominantly Black Brixton in his late teen years. For the first time in his life, he’s surrounded by other Black people, but he doesn’t identify as one of them; as he tells a new friend, he’s a British boy from Surrey, not a Black boy from the West Indies.

Eventually, he starts to adopt the mannerisms of his new community and grows fond of reggae music, becoming an MC and music pioneer for Crucial Rocker. The music is important here, as it offers Alex a chance to form a unique identity. The role of music in the Small Axe anthology may be most pronounced in the house party film Lovers Rock, but it’s most central to the characterizations here, where Alex molds himself into a confident MC and uses that as a means of informing his adult personality; he creates a fake persona to serve as as foundation that allows him the safety to be his authentic self.

McQueen is usually meticulous with the structure of his films—think of the flashback structure of Widows or the calculated time jumps in Mangrove. But Alex Wheatle is looser than his other films, both in this anthology and his previous works. Like the central character, it’s a bit wandering, searching for something to latch onto. McQueen jumps back and forth in time to juxtapose Alex’s time in foster care with prison, framing both as forms of isolation and punishment. He periodically returns to the prison setting as Alex meets a rastafarian mentor, Simeon (Robbie Gee), who introduces him to influential Black literature and awakens a literary interest in the young man. These encounters with Simeon parallel Alex’s interest in music early. It seems that clearly art is Alex’s calling and chosen means of expression. Thus, the looseness of the structure, the lack of a clear arc or bold temporal decisions is revealed not as inexactitude, but a mirroring of Alex’s personality and another calculated decision by McQueen.

Most critics have deemed Alex Wheatle the weakest of the Small Axe films, but that’s damning with faint praise. Like Red, White and Blue, it only tells the formative chapter in a person’s life. Like Leroy Logan, Alex Wheatle is also a real person. He went on to become a decorated writer for young adults and a celebrated British artist. Perhaps the fleeting glimpse of this man’s life doesn’t register as strongly as the parties of Lovers Rock or the courtroom confrontations of Mangrove, but it’s still an evocative film that allows us to witness the foundation of an individual and the awakening of an artist. The drama may not register as strongly, but the artistry lingers.

8 out of 10

Small Axe: Alex Wheatle (2020, UK/USA)

Directed by Steve McQueen; written by Steve McQueen and Alastair Siddons; starring Sheyi Cole, Robbie Gee, Johann Myers, Jonathan Jules.