YARDIE: A Powerful Coming-Of-Age Crime Thriller Staggered By Passion

I don’t think I was the only one with high hopes for Yardie. A British crime adaptation tracking a Jamaican man’s rise through the criminal underworld of 1980’s Hackney already holds high expectations following the biting offerings of Sorry to Bother You and BlacKkKlansman, let alone its release under a director whose acting career can be summarised as nothing if not ‘intense’.

I can’t help but feel these expectations may in some part overlook the enthusiasm very noticeably present throughout Idris Elba’s directorial debut, for Yardie isn’t so much a bad film as it is bearing the roughness that can sometimes accompany a filmmaker’s first time directing.

Coming-of-Age Crime Meets Fond 80’s Tribute

Like the 1992 Victor Headley novel from which Elba adapts, Yardie takes its name from the UK slang used to refer to Jamaican gang members, suggesting this is still very much a film concerned with the status and identity of its protagonist. We open upon 1970’s Kingston, Jamaica – one half of the film’s location shoot –  where Dennis ‘D’ Campbell (Kidulthood’s Aml Ameen) is a thirteen-year-old living between two rival gang territories with brother, Jerry Dead (Evaraldo Creary). Amid gunfire and innocent bloodshed, the two are inseparable due to a mutual passion for music, and regularly DJ for Kingston locals in attempt to bring the warring subsects together.

After a shooting suddenly ends the brothers’ musical double act, however, a traumatized and resentful D grows up under criminal kingpin, King Fox, who after struggling to contain D’s frequent fits of rage sends him on a simple drug delivery job in Hackney, London. Still bitter however, D becomes increasingly familiar with Fox’s East End contacts, organising small-scale investigations to avenge his brother’s death, while also attempting to reconnect with childhood love, Yvonne (Shantol Jackson).

Elba’s film retains both the main story arc and introspective style observed in Headley’s novel, though suffuses D’s rise throughout London’s subterranean drug trade with his own experiences as a young black DJ in 1980’s, Jamaican-obsessed Hackney (Elba has recalled needing to feign an accent to liven up events), in pursuit of a more uplifting story about finding relief in music.

Yardie touts its successes proudly with respect to this, and with absolute confidence. Elba diligently reconstructs 1980’s Hackney with grungy green overlay, throwing glances toward its punk rocker iconoclasm and urban dilapidation through permeable wafts of cigarette smoke. The meandering haze of Hackney’s criminal underworld is a firm contrast with cinematographer John Conway’s conception of 70’s Jamaica, whose romantic cruises through Kingston’s shambly side streets lined with pastel-shaded buildings are adroitly pitched against whirling shots of its penetrating violence and murder.

There’s almost a nostalgic edge to the way Elba presents his East End roots – for Yardie’s several DJing sections are lit with Rastafarian reds and greens, as the slowed, giving its underground parties a dreamlike quality as its inhabitants bob rhythmically in shadow. The effect of Elba’s compact selection of 70’s reggae classics truly swells here, allowing the hypnotic groove of Black Uhuru and Fabian’s seminal Prophecy to drive these suspended moments.

Energy and Enthusiasm Comes at the Expense of Concision and Clarity

Less confident is the overall story Elba wishes to tell. D’s desire to avenge Jerry, his interest in DJing and his burgeoning chemistry with Yvonne and daughter Vanessa all pose promising narrative threads, but all work independently from one another, and (aside from one scene that isn’t expanded upon in much depth) fail to interact in a way that puts a stake in D’s decisions. Elba seems just as interested in creating a highly personal tale about brotherhood and passion as in the wider bargainings between criminal kingpins; a combination that could’ve worked well, had the tension between personal and political been more explicit.

If this is a story about finding release in music, furthermore, Yardie doesn’t give itself the room to really create that release within its protagonist. While we’re frequently presented with D’s frustration as he holds a young mother at gunpoint in search of Jerry’s killer, his growing friendship with novice DJ Sticks (Calvin Demba) finds little time to develop alongside the action-packed hit-ups and confrontations, leaving the spiritual freedom in music that united Yardie’s central brothers wavering decidedly in the background. The emotional development of the characters may also struggle to land unanimously across audiences due to Brock Norman Brock and Martin Stellman’s script, which is informed by a Jamaican vernacular that overlays each and every exchange.

That the patois is kept without condensing is an admirable decision, though potentially to the film’s detriment, for character exchanges will no doubt be hard on the ears for many viewers, especially those unaccustomed to particular dialects or turns of phrase. Those who didn’t struggle with Menhaj Huda’s Kidulthood – in which Ameen also starred – will stand in good stead for Yardie (for there is some very loose overlap), but I expect a large portion of Elba’s audience will find themselves constantly relying on tone and exposition to make sense of character exchanges and intentions.

It must be said that Ameen and Shantol Jackson make a convincing romantic couple (with newcomer Myler-Rae Hutchinson turning a reprieving focus on D’s warmer side), but the script rarely grants them sufficient time to garner the chemistry needed for their relationship to put a stake in D’s wider pursuit of vengeance, nor vice-versa; a struggle that inevitably renders the film’s oddly neat conclusion more disorientating than satisfying.

The few comic sequences present appear to want to follow the impulses of Snatch – a comparison heightened by the appearance of Stephen Graham, who is as rabidly intense as ever as the cocaine-snorting Rico. But while kudos goes to Graham for his surprisingly adept Jamaican accent (which incidentally revealed his previously undocumented biracial heritage), the urgent fussing and rapid-fire bickering Snatch delivered in spades are drawn out too long here, and far less snappily to hold up in a British crime film.

Conclusion: Yardie

In the wake of Sorry to Bother You and the BlacKkKlansman – both of which offer more purposeful uses of comedy to raise pressing issues around power, race and identity – Yardie feels somewhat safe by comparison; more a personal send-off to an era regarded highly by its director, than the coming-of-age crime film it aspires to be.

Though by no means a bad film, it lacks staying power, specifically for its inability to tie narrative threads to arrive at a satisfying conclusion. What is evident, however, is that Elba has a distinct flair for articulating emotion through colour and set-design, and the power that lay within Yardie’s music sequences are no doubt a promising glimpse at what Elba might be capable of producing in the future.

Did Idris Elba’s directorial debut hold up for you? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below!

Yardie was released in the UK on August 31, 2018.  For all international release dates, see here.