'Urchin': Harris Dickinson’s Quietly Devastating, Brilliant Directorial Debut

A haunting portrait of survival, trauma, and life on the edges of East London.

‘Urchin,’ Harris Dickinson’s feature-length directorial debut, is a powerful, enthralling, and quietly devastating journey through the life of a young homeless man in East London - Mike, played by Frank Dillane. Premiering in May at Cannes under Un Certain Regard, where Dickinson scooped up the FIPRESCI Prize and Dillane won Best Actor, the film landed in UK cinemas on October 3. Speaking to Dazed last year, Dickinson described Urchin as a film about mental health and “people who fall between the cracks” - those failed by the system “in certain ways.”

Dickinson’s roots in East London are crucial to understanding Urchin. Born in Leytonstone (as he often points out, also the birthplace of Alfred Hitchcock) and raised in Highams Park, Dickinson grew up in the calm outer edges of North East London. He attended Highams Park School while honing his acting at RAW, and left at 17 planning to join the Royal Marines. Ultimately, he turned to acting - but his upbringing under the shadow of austerity and his father’s work as a social worker clearly left a mark. Since adolescence, Dickinson has been preoccupied with life on the edges of society. His early directing credits, including music videos for his long-time partner Rose Gray, blend magical realism with social commentary - a balance that finds full expression in ‘Urchin.’

Before acting took off with his 2017 breakout in Eliza Hittman’s ‘Beach Rats,’ Dickinson worked a series of odd jobs: litter-picking (his favourite - and notably one of Mike’s gigs in the film), café shifts, and other bits. “I don’t think I like the idea of being in the limelight,” he told Vogue in 2017, “but that’s a small price to pay if you get to do amazing work in films.” Since then, his profile has risen exponentially, and it’s set to skyrocket again with his upcoming role as John Lennon, alongside Paul Mescal, Barry Keoghan, and Joseph Quinn.

Dickinson began developing ‘Urchin’ around five or six years ago. The story originally sprawled much wider, but he later chose to zero in on Mike - “it felt like I was trying to do too much too soon for a first feature,” he said. During writing, Dickinson dove deep into trauma - how the brain rewires itself after crises, and how we construct internal myths to survive. “Our brain is capable of really wild things when we’ve been through traumatic events,” he reflected, adding that the peace often associated with nature or solitude “can also be really destabilising.”

Those ideas bleed into Urchin’s strange, moving interludes: dreamlike sequences that recur often when Mike showers, culminating in the film’s haunting final scene. They’re difficult to decode, but they make intuitive sense - reminiscent of the abstract beauty of Paul Thomas Anderson’s ‘Punch-Drunk Love’ (one of Dickinson’s cinematic heroes, alongside Ken Loach and Agnès Varda). The film was, fittingly, once titled ‘Dream Space.’

In preparation, Dillane sketched Mike - a character study that shaped his physicality throughout filming. Dickinson also hosted weekly screenings for the cast and crew, immersing them in a canon of outsider cinema: Agnès Varda’s ‘Vagabond’, Lino Brocka’s ‘Manila in the Claws of Light’, Leos Carax’s ‘Lovers on the Bridge’, and documentaries by Marc Isaacs.

The result is a film that merges social realism with flashes of the surreal - the kind of cinematic tightrope that’s rarely walked this well. Dillane is unwavering as Mike, delivering one of the year’s best performances, while the supporting cast rarely falters (though Dickinson himself feels slightly unconvincing as Mike’s junkie non-friend Nathan).

Throughout the film, Mike is haunted by a strange old woman - first a violinist, later a nun - who seems to appear only during his crises. She first shows up in an altercation early on, which leads him to briefly connect, then violently clash, with an innocent bystander, Simon (Okezie Morro), landing Mike in jail for nearly a year. After his release, he lands a job cooking at a hotel for his boss, Franco (Amr Waked), before burning out and returning to litter-picking - where he meets Andrea (Megan Northam), a quiet calm in his storm. For a time, things look up: sobriety, a steady income, somewhere to sleep. But as the cycle inevitably turns, Mike slips back toward Nathan and the abyss. The final scene - a hallucinatory descent that ends with Mike curling into a foetal position - is simultaneously unbearable and transcendent.

Harris Dickinson’s direction is magnificent: both tender and unflinching, political yet poetic. Variety praised the film’s “resonant human texture and political feeling in its close-up individual portrait.” Empire wrote that it “forgoes pity in favour of illustrating the complex humanity of someone who’s been made to believe they’re not worth saving.”

But I think Musti said it best: “Hold tite a man like Harris on his debut.”