Film

“What name do you want?” asks a middle-aged British gent (Mullan). “Jack,” replies the young man (Garfield) sitting across from him. Soon, Jack gets a job, some mates and a girlfriend (Lyons). He has, in essence, an anonymous blue-collar life in Manchester. But when mention of past prison stints comes up, Jack’s answer—“stealing cars”—sounds a little too rehearsed. A large, rattling skeleton rests in the boy’s closet (the title refers to a pseudonym used in England’s juvenile-court system). The more we piece together what happened, the greater our desire is to protect this sympathetic kid from his own past.

It’s easy to imagine how, in a multitude of other hands, Boy A could have ended up being another TV-tragedy-of-the-week (U.K. division) about redemption. Wisely, John Crowley embeds the mulling of social issues within a character study, albeit one that stylistically straddles Loachian realism and lad-movie flashiness. Considering Intermission (2003), Crowley’s unsavory blend of Altman multitasking and Tarantino chic, this is a huge step forward; he now seems to be more interested in human beings rather than homages. The movie belongs, however, to Garfield: Feral, paranoid and childlike, his Jack is a walking open wound. It’s the type of vulnerable performance that turns an ordinary drama into something truly devastating.