San Sebastian Film Festival 2011: Wild Bill

Dexter Fletcher's Wild Bill just had its world premiere in San Sebastian, and, quite understandably, the audience went for it in a big way. The Spanish have an incredible appetite for films that embrace dark themes and subjects – as long as there is a genuine heart and emotion there too. I once saw a film here called Savages, about neo-Nazi drug dealers who beat up their aunt (Marisa Paredes), but although the film was really about the scourge of racism in modern Spain, the audience responded more to Paredes's fragile performance and gave the film a standing ovation. Now, Wild Bill is by no means as gritty as Savages, but it is set in the crummier recesses of East London, where crack dealing/smoking is a way of life and the local community has adapted to accommodate that.

It begins with Bill (Charlie Creed-Miles) coming out of prison in the Isle Of Wight. He makes his way to what used to be home, only to find that his partner has abandoned not only him but his two boys, Dean (Will Poulter) and Jimmy (Attack The Block's Sammy Williams). Teenager Dean, 15, having lied about his age, has a job on a nearby building site where the Olympic site is being constructed, and tries to keep little Jimmy on the straight and narrow. He is not impressed, then, when his old man is delivered, blotto, to the flat – on his first day of freedom – by his old drug-dealing cronies, who have given him a sample of their wares in order to lure him back into the game. So Dean takes the drugs and gives Bill an ultimatum: either he goes, or Dean will shop him to the police.

This is pretty much the main set-up of Fetcher's debut and it sets things up pretty nicely for the two dramas that are about to unfold simultaneously. Both involve Bill's destiny. Will he fall back into his old ways? And more importantly, can he accept his role as father, especially when one of his boys hates him and the other doesn't even know who he is?

As you'd expect from a film directed by an actor with 35 years experience, the performances are uniformly excellent and there are some enjoyable cameos too, from old friends and workmates (Jamie Winston and Jason Flemyng pop up as social workers; Andy Serkis is the film's shadowy Mr Big). And central to it is Charlie Creed-Miles as Bill, who appears to have been hiding his brilliance in plain sight for quite some years now. Creed-Miles gives this character an unexpected pathos; he's a bad guy struggling with his conscience, and though the film doesn't sugarcoat his prison record (dealing and attempted murder, which he refutes as GBH), Bill does emerge an unlikely hero, especially when the local gang, led by the leering T (Leo Gregory), recruits Jimmy to be a drug mule.

There are plenty of British films out there trying to sell/tell similar stories, but Wild Bill works not only because its characters are so deftly sketched but because Fletcher has worked so hard to make his film cinematic. Shot by George Richmond, whose most recent work involved a stint on Steve Spielberg's War Horse, and crisply edited by Stuart Gazzard, the film has a fluidity and subtlety that keeps several balls in the air. While Bill is facing his moral dilemma, we see Dean falling for local single-mum hairdresser Steph (Charlotte Spencer), and this very sweet storyline is arguably what snaps Bill out of his post-prison concussion. A big fan of PT Anderson, Fletcher has appropriated some of that director's kinetic style too, with some interesting tracking and dolly shots that keep the film moving. Robert Altman's McCabe & Mrs Miller is a big influence also, with the Olympic village rising in the background just as the frontier town does in Altman's film, although here it works not quite as a metaphor for society but for Bill's growing maturity as a man and a father.

I don't want to make too many claims for Will Bill. It won't bring world peace or cure the common cold but it's a very lovely and intelligent piece of British filmmaking, putting a human spin on the crime genre with some great acting by old faces and new (in particular Poulter and Spencer). Fletcher and Creed-Miles pull the whole thing together, however, and it's hard to single one out over the other. So I won't; all I'll say is see for yourself when the film has its UK premiere on October 21 at the London Film Festival (Vue 7). Believe me, it's worth seeing.