If Georgie (Lola Campbell) were possessed of any more pluck, she’d be the greatest banjo player South East England had ever seen. As it is, the 12-year-old at the big, soft heart of this wildly charming, Sundance-award-winning debut is just surviving – though without the help of any grown-ups, thank you very much.
Georgie has recently lost her mother to cancer, and still lives in what used to be the pair’s council house, keeping everything just as her mum liked it, while ticking off the stages of grief on a Post-it Note stuck to the fridge, as if working through a shopping list. Her source of income is selling the bicycles she steals and resprays with her friend and confidant Ali (Alin Uzun), while telephone calls from social services are fended off by her “uncle”: a tessellation of voice recordings provided by the shiftless teen behind the counter in the local corner shop.
Before you can say “what that girl needs is a father”, one turns up and almost immediately makes you rethink. His name is Jason (Harris Dickinson), and he marks his arrival not with a knock at the door, but by vaulting shiftily over the back garden fence, ominous bleached-blond crop first.
A feckless dad and his estranged, precocious daughter cautiously reconnecting? We’ve seen this done – and done well – in many films before, from Paper Moon to last year’s Aftersun, and Scrapper’s 29-year-old writer-director Charlotte Regan doesn’t make any radical tweaks to the template. Instead, she and her small, perfectly assembled cast bring a wryness to the format that recall Bill Forsyth’s That Sinking Feeling and Gregory’s Girl. And that reminds you in turn how rarely British cinema these days allows its working-class characters to be as eccentric as their posher associates.
Well, Scrapper does. Nothing is poached from Loach here: there are dabs of magic realism in every corner, while the colour palette is pure Woolworth’s pick ’n’ mix. (The cinematographer, Molly Manning Walker, is herself the young debut director of this November’s Cannes prize-winning How to Have Sex.) As Jason, Triangle of Sadness star Dickinson is a winningly hapless presence – in an amusing grace note, he warms far more quickly to Georgie’s friend Ali than to his own offspring, and even then, more as a peer than an adult. But when the time for paternal bonding arrives, his rapport with his untrained 11-year-old co-star is delightful: the film’s best scenes are the ones in which nothing really happens beyond the two just messing around.
