Director: Tim Mielants
Starring: Cillian Murphy, Tracey Ullman, Jay Lycurgo, Simbi Ajikawo, Emily Watson
Certificate: 15
Run Time: 108 mins

Steve is a drama that centres around a headteacher of a boarding school for troubled boys called Stanton Wood in 1995. The school is effectively a last chance saloon for the sweary and rowdy boys, instead of prison. The film’s directed by Tim Mielants, who reunites with Cillian Murphy after last year’s Small Things Like These, which I found very overrated. It’s an adaptation of a 2003 novella called Shy by Max Porter (who writes the script here), which was told from the perspective of one of the 16-year-old students, Shy (played here by Jay Lycurgo). For Steve, that shifts to Cillian Murphy’s headteacher. The film opens as we see the very run-down Steve heading to school, where a local news crew are there for the day to film a piece, framing the question whether the teachers are doing good work, or if these boys are a lost cause and the taxpayer shouldn’t be wasting their money on keeping the school going.

Steve is a poignant and engaging film with a standout Cillian Murphy performance, as the weary headteacher battling his own demons. There’s a complexity to how Mileants gets us to side with the teenagers and overstretched staff, and it’s fascinating to see how the film crew take advantage of the situation. This is enunciated by Robrecht Heyvaert’s kinetic cinematography, who disorientingly lenses the school. It’s easy to see straightaway the inevitable conclusion the film barrels towards, but the staff are desperate to make the best of it – if they can’t set these teenagers on the correct course, no-one can.

Outside of the terrific Cillian Murphy performance, Tracey Ullman, Simbi Ajikawo and Emily Watson are all excellent as other teachers – Ullman in particular in an uncharacteristically serious role as the school’s deputy head. There’s some impressionable performances among the teenagers too, with Jay Lycurgo standing out as Shy, with the character describing himself as “angry and bored” when asked to define himself by the news crew in three words. But it’s a shame the character doesn’t have a little more meat to the bone – yes, Mielants clearly portrays him as a complex but lost cause, an individual who recognises what he’s done wrong, but the film could have dug deeper.

Steve is very close to being an excellent film – this is a mature and moving piece with some top-notch performances. It’s great to see Cillian Murphy opting for the smaller types of roles he found his original success from off the back of his Best Actor Oscar win for Oppenheimer. I just wish Steve had a little more ferocity up its sleeve for it to really shine.