Blitz

A gripping existentialist look at one night of the London blitzkrieg as seen through the eyes of a mixed-race boy and his stalwart mother, played by Saoirse Ronan.

Saoirse Ronan gets star billing in “Blitz,” but she’s not the main character. She plays Rita Hanway, a single mother in London during the 1940 blitzkrieg, as German planes dropped tons of bombs nightly in an attempt to terrorize the British into submission.

The real center of the story is her son, George, played by Elliott Heffernan, who I’m guessing is about 10 years old. He’s supposed to be evacuated to the countryside for his safety, but sees it as a betrayal by his mother. So he jumps off the train and spends one very Dickensian night of adventures trying to find his way back to her.

George is also a mixed-raced boy, which obviously presents lots of challenges for him in this time and place, when romance between white British women and Black immigrants was very much frowned upon. The director and writer, Steve McQueen, is himself a Black Brit and and his films often comment subtly and not so subtly (“12 Years a Slave”) on the schism between differing groups of people.

It’s a beautifully shot movie (cinematography by Yorick Le Saux), with top-notch period production values and a reliably moving musical score by Hans Zimmer.

It isn’t the movie I expected; Ronan is one of the top actresses in her age cohort so it was a little surprising to see Rita shunted into a more or less background role. Rita, upon finding out George has gone missing, goes on her own search. Their journeys parallel somewhat, but George’s is the bigger and more interesting one.

There are also flashbacks to previous times, such as Rita’s romance with Grenadian immigrant, Marcus (CJ Beckford), that ended abruptly, so George never got to meet his father. Sometimes the story will flip back many years, or just a few days or even hours.

Perhaps the most startling time switch is a swanky London nightclub full of fantastic swing music, singing, dancing and drinks, which we get to see both right before and right after the bombs come.

George falls in with a group of three runaway brothers for some good-natured scamps, and is befriended by Ife (Benjamin Clementine), a friendly and wise bomb warden from Nigeria who shows him a strong, confident personification of Blackness, which he has shunned amidst all the bullying and ostracism he receives.

In a much more forbidding sequence, George is captured and forcibly employed by a gang of thieves, led by the volatile Albert (Stephen Graham), who are using the occasion of the blitz to steal from bombed homes and shops, and need a small lad to shimmy into tight spaces they can’t. It’s a whole little disturbing, dysfunctional family unit, like a malevolent version of Fagin and his boy pickpockets in “Oliver Twist.”

Later, George will take refuge in the Underground, the subway system under London that was officially off-limits but is turned into an ersatz bomb shelter by the stubborn British. But more threats and terror loom.

As much as I was engaged by each of these sequences, they don’t seem particularly connected to each other as a narrative whole, and are more like episodes from different movies strung together.

Rita’s portion of the story is less interesting from a storytelling perspective, but emotionally richer. As a worker in a factory of women making bombs of their own, she is given the opportunity to sing live on the BBC radio, an event with an unexpected twist, which raises the ire of the floor boss — a little tinpot despot who seems more like a cinematic type than a character.

She and George live in a small flat with her father (Paul Weller), a steady fellow who likes to play the piano. Rita exchanges regular glances with Jack (Harris Dickinson), a chap a bit younger than herself, who spends every night digging out the rubble of the latest blown-apart buildings. It’s not really a romance, more like a placeholder for one that might come later.

“Blitz” is quite gripping, and handsomely made, full of authentic details, like the St. Christopher necklace George cherishes as the only piece he has of his father. Heffernan acquits himself well, though the movie is careful to confine him to reacting to what grownups do, so despite the plethora of screen time George doesn’t say very much.

I liked “Blitz” as a piece of storytelling, even if it’s not very interested in depicting the history of the blitzkrieg and is more the dark existentialist adventure of one boy. It’s not a universal story but a narrow one. Watching it, I almost thought it must be based on someone’s autobiographical account. For a work of fiction, it lands with the thump of lived realism.