Steve review: 'quiet power and nuance'

Steve (15) ★★★

Early on in Steve, Cillian Murphy’s eponymous teacher pokes fun at the sentimental tropes of the inspirational teacher genre of which this film is a part. Reaching out to a particularly damaged and violent teen with a rawer version of the sort of tough-love speech found in the likes of Stand and Deliver, Dangerous Minds and the genre-adjacent Good Will Hunting, he slips into a self-mocking American accent before his student can take the piss out of him. In a harshly rendered movie about an experimental British young offenders institute circa 1996, it’s a small moment of levity. But it’s also indicative of the tricky needle this adaptation of Max Porter’s 2023 novel, Shy, is trying to thread.

This is a movie, after all, intent on giving us an unvarnished look at a broken, underfunded system and the toll this takes on both the youth that need it and educators doing their best to make it work. Yet it’s also a film that wants some of the hope and uplift associated with the cornier version of this story, and so camouflages this intent with social realist tropes of its own (handheld cameras, tight close-ups, lots of fighting and swearing) so we don’t notice how conventional it really is.

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None of which is to doubt the integrity of Murphy’s granular performance, which is deeply felt and magnetic and gets at the contradictions of a character self-medicating with booze and pills while trying to keep his teenage charges on the straight-and-narrow. Following him over the course of a particularly trying 24-hour shift, we can see he’s spiralling towards breaking point – a descent which Murphy navigates with quiet power and nuance, even when Porter (who wrote the script) and director Tim Miliants (who previously directed Murphy in last year’s Small Things Like These) awkwardly cram in a needlessly clunky revelation about a past trauma to justify Steve’s addictions.

But if the showcase it provides Murphy makes it hard to argue with Porter’s decision to rewrite the story from the teacher’s point of view instead of finding a way to adapt the harder-to-dramatise perspective of his novel’s violent, complex, drum-and-bass-obsessed teenage protagonist Shy (played here by Jay Lycurgo), that also feels like a missed opportunity. Shy’s plight is still there, but it gets lost in the maelstrom – ironic for a film about the dangers of suffering in silence.

Steve is on selected release in cinemas from 19 September and streams on Netflix from 3 October.

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