Stream It or Skip It: ‘Small Axe: Alex Wheatle’ on Amazon Prime, Steve McQueen’s Rumination on the Brixton Uprising

Alex Wheatle is the fourth film in Steve McQueen’s Amazon Prime anthology Small Axe, a series of stories focused on London’s Black Caribbean culture between the 1960s-’80s. The tone this week isn’t tragic — it’s the biography of a real-life British man of Jamaican descent who was orphaned, grew up in social services, and participated in the 1981 Brixton Uprising. He’s 57 now, a creative writing instructor and award-winning author, and this is his superhero origin story.

SMALL AXE: ALEX WHEATLE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Alex (Sheyi Cole) wears the blank face of a person in shock. He’s walked through prison corridors and given a rough shove on his way into a cell. It reeks in there. His cellmate, Simeon (Robbie Gee), a burly Rastafarian with a headful of dreads, is shockingly hospitable for a prison cellmate. He apologizes for the smell. Prison food doesn’t agree with him, and it’s just the two of them and the commode in the room. Anything you need, help yourself, just ask, he says to Alex. But Alex doesn’t say anything. He just stares.

Flashback: Prison is not Alex’s first institution experience. He lived in a foster home run by a cruel woman who singled him out and beat him. Alex is the only Black kid we see there. His parents abandoned him years ago. He endures racist taunts by white kids in school, and when he retaliates violently, Alex is the one who gets in trouble. He’s wrapped in a straitjacket and slammed facedown on the floor in a large, empty room. There’s that blank look again. Back in the present, he’s still staring, empty, but the trancelike state is broken by the sounds of Simeon noisily emptying his bowels. Again. Alex snaps. He attacks Simeon, who’s very much the larger man. Simeon defends himself and takes Alex down and Alex sobs, incapacitated. “Start at the beginning,” Simeon says calmly. There’s compassion in his voice.

Another flashback: Alex is in his late teens now, being driven new to a boarding house in Brixton. His eyes brighten — the people in this neighborhood look like him. There’s life here. He barely gets inside his new room when there’s a knock. Dawn (Fumilayo Brown-Olateju) and Dennis (Jonathan Jules) greet him; she’s friendly and kind, he good-naturedly busts Alex’s balls. That hair and that clothing has to go, Dennis says. They go to the hairdresser, they shoplift a new pair of shoes, they smoke some weed. They walk down the street, and Alex kindly nods and smiles to a police officer, and Dennis chastises him. “But they’re here to help us,” Alex insists. Naive. Alex loves music, loves playing records, has plans to form a DJ crew called Crucial Rocker. Alex has no one, so Dennis brings him to his family’s Christmas dinner, and Alex wolfs down peas and rice and fried chicken like a kid who has learned to eat food fast before someone else takes it. So this is what kindness is like. But how did Alex end up in prison?

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: McQueen’s films inevitably feature a shot that’ll crack you in half. Here, it’s a long, unblinking closeup on Alex as he lies, unmoving, straitjacketed on the floor, eyes wide and staring, paralyzed. It’s a portrait of suffering on par with the shot of Chiwetel Ejiofor in a noose in 12 Years a Slave.

Performance Worth Watching: First-time actor Cole so exquisitely expresses alienation, it makes any instance of his relief from it all the more powerful.

Memorable Dialogue: Simeon’s exhortation every time he noisily relieves himself: “Jahhhhhhhhhhhhh!”

But also Simeon’s advice for him: “If you don’t know your past, you don’t know your future.”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Sixty-six minutes, and every one of them counts. Especially the long, drawn-out shot of Alex walking into the “record shack” and drinking heavily of the vibes as the camera circles slowly: The grizzled Rastas behind the counter. The colorful posters. The Trojan Records label peeking out the hole of a white sleeve. Alex sometimes introduces himself to people by saying, “For me, it’s always about the music.” The reggae, the dub. The wax and the needle and the grooves. Alongside the rich performances he inspires, the penetrating cinematography, the incisive writing, the assured direction, McQueen’s primary tool for immersion in Small Axe is music, and it colors Alex Wheatle in deep, deep shades.

This relatively brief film is all about its subject’s cultural education. Dennis teaches him how to not walk like a narc. Simeon — the wise man on the shitter — teaches him what to read. Life teaches him what to be angry about: McQueen stops the film cold to focus on real-life stills of the New Cross Massacre, the fire that killed 13 kids and was a spark in Brixton’s socio-economic tinderbox. It doesn’t touch on Alex’s adult successes, instead focusing on the raw, formative experiences of his youth. This is how he became Alex Wheatle.

Like the first three Small Axe films, Alex Wheatle is typically absorbing, detailed, spiked with the type of bracing intensity underscoring the vitality of McQueen’s intent. He’s underscoring the problems of a volatile time — racism, classism — but has shown so much hopefulness in Alex’s story, in the landmark court case in Mangrove, in the struggles of Leroy Logan in Red, White and Blue, in the music-as-liberation themes of series masterwork Lovers Rock. McQueen offers no pat resolution or easy answers for the situations he depicts — he will have no such arrogance. But if intends to inspire, he’s doing it. He. Is. Doing. It.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Alex Wheatle is another Small Axe must-see. It’s growing in my mind with every passing moment.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Stream Small Axe: Alex Wheatle on Amazon Prime