“A testament to the idea that we can only form a community together, but also shows how hard that is to do in a world in which we measure success by our ability to leave our class behind”

Honesty and understanding your subject matter goes a long way in cinema, because when you have that the message you try to get across through your story rings so much more true. In her fifth feature film British director Clio Barnard shows she possesses that honesty and understanding of her characters, however flawed they are. With much love for a central group of young people from a working class background, I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning, based on the novel of the same title by Birmingham novelist and poet Keiran Goddard, tackles themes such as class struggle and crossing the threshold into adulthood, and turns it into a heartwarming, sometimes bittersweet, and often funny plea for class solidarity and the importance of friendship.

The setting is Birmingham and they are five young people around the age of 30, friends since they were barely teens. Patrick (Anthony Boyle) and Shiv (Lola Petticrew), married with two children; Oli (Jay Lycurgo), who just hit the big three-o and is trying to tone down his alcohol and drug consumption; Conor (Daryl McCormack), about to be a dad and facing the pressure of being the foreman on a new apartment complex build; and Rian (Joe Cole), an investor in this project, after having had a substantial windfall on the stock market with his father’s inheritance. They all have some sort of responsibility in their lives, for children, a stray mutt, or a project with a substantial amount of money on the line. Despite that, none of them have truly left their wild twenties behind. They still party their heads off from time to time, dropping drugs and consuming alcohol like a fish does water. Even Rian, although he has moved out of the neighborhood and into a sleek apartment in the city, and dates a woman (Emma, played by Millie Brady) above his working class background. As close friends they still have each other’s backs, even Rian, and that’s what counts. But growing up is hard, and at some point the cracks start showing; Rian crumbles when Emma leaves him, Conor drowns his anxiety over a miscalculated loan on the building project in alcohol, and even the marriage of Pat and Shiv finds itself in choppy waters when a long-kept secret comes out. But like blood, true friendship runs thicker than water, and despite the trials and tribulations their bonds are too strong to break.

Goddard’s novel is made of five inner monologues, which on the surface makes it hard to adapt, but Barnard has crafted five utterly believable characters and nails their milieu. Birmingham is a city of great inequality, and Barnard’s tale of relative poverty and the ease with which alcohol and drugs are seen as a way to dull life’s problems at an age when you either grow up of drown show a deep understanding of this almost forgotten generation. Since the Thatcher era social housing has been slowly demolished, getting people around the age of this friend group stuck in a system that has nothing to offer them. The images of demolition juxtaposed with Rian and Conor’s project going up underlines the privatization of spaces that generations before them could build a solid life in. Patrick, a food delivery employee (a gig job that is the epitome of labor exploitation) with a university background and a strident socialist line of thinking confronts his friend with this fact; who exactly is Rian building these apartments for, he asks. The only way to move up from your class is by burying, it seems.

The male characters all display different sides of masculinity, and also different ways in which this can fail, from the fragility of Patrick’s confidence, a result of a university degree and a good set of brains not being enough to work his way out of the struggle, to Oli, a drug dealer being confronted with the realities of what his ‘profession’ does to his clientèle as well as to himself down the road. The portrayal of male friendship, at times tested and bent but never breaking, is one of the most tender and realistic put to film in recent memory. Again, honesty and understanding your subject matters. They may call each other ‘bro’ a lot, but the negative image that these types of ‘bros’ have is challenged by showing how they too struggle and have doubts and emotions, and their undivided love for Shiv is evidence that underneath that masculine veneer that society forces upon them there is love and respect, and simply a good heart. They have their flaws, they make their mistakes; life is a matter of falling down and getting back up, certainly at this age, and showing vulnerability makes you a responsible adult. That is why it’s hard not to fall in love with these youngsters, warts and all. They are, as they say, ‘good people’ that will make it in life, even if the cards are stacked against them. Moving out of their class is near impossible, as shown through Rian’s arc: he may have made the money that allows him to move up a class, but with his background he will never truly fit in. But as long as they stick together they will find a way to make it through. Sometimes friendship is all you need.

Barnard paints the lives of these people finding their footing in a world that hardly has a place for them with a sensitive brush. It isn’t all doom and gloom, as her screenplay allows for moments of levity and tenderness. This is in a sense Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting, but with much less drugs. That film too showed a comradery among members of the lower classes, navigating between humor and drama. Those moments of drama can be intense in I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning, with emotions hitting you like a brick, but the ‘get up, we will work through this together’ attitude of the characters is affecting. The film shows the value of true friendship and is almost a manifesto for class solidarity (one of Patrick’s monologues in particular comes off as the author speaking through the mouth of one of her characters); Ken Loach, who unfortunately this week admitted that he will not be making films anymore, would be proud. In Barnard, who worked in these class spaces before in films like The Arbor and The Selfish Giant, we might have just found his spiritual successor. Even though not from a working class background herself, Barnard’s films come from the heart, regarding her subjects not as curiosities to study, but standing beside them and understanding them as human beings without. Not with pathos but with compassion, and with the recognition that we have sold this generation short. I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning is a testament to the idea that we can only form a community together, but also shows how hard that is to do in a world in which we measure success by our ability to leave our class behind.