"If you don't know your past you don't know your future" - Simeon.
Brixton in the late seventies and early eighties had a bit of a reputation. Atlantic Road and Coldharbour Lane were judged, sometimes correctly, often harshly, to have a bit of edge. For a young well spoken black lad like Alex Wheatle from Shirley Oaks in Surrey you'd have imagined it might have been a culture shock and in many ways, as we see in Steve McQueen's fourth film of his Small Axe series (BBC1/iPlayer), it was.
But Wheatle (Sheyi Cole), despite his accent, despite his uncool PVC jacket, despite asking where Babylon is on a map, despite nodding genially at passing policeman, and despite walking like that "scarecrow on TV" (presumably Worzel Gummidge), is made of tougher stuff than many of his peers realise.
Wheatle went on to become an award winning writer of young adult fiction and even an MBE but Small Axe goes back to a much earlier part of his life than that. We see him growing up in care homes after being abandoned by his mother at birth, we see him physically assaulted and verbally abused by a carer, we see him taunted with monkey impressions at school, and we see him coming of age in a lovingly recreated Brixton at the dawn of Thatcherism and at a time when the National Front were a serious threat.
Wheatle already loves reggae (the soundtrack features both Eek-A-Mouse and Bob Marley and there are Jah Shaka and Coxsone Dodd posters in the background of Brixton's record shops) and we see his eyes light up when he first visits SW9. It's more than a shared sense of affinity, it's almost a revelation.
Taken under the wing of new friends Dennis (Jonathan Jules) and Badger (Khali Best), young Alex is taught streetwise ways, given a crash course in patois (he didn't know corn meant money), and soon enough becomes a founder member of the Special Brew swigging Crucial Rocker sound system under the DJ name Yardman Irie.
To see Wheatle's discovery of himself is enjoyable in a rites of passage kind of way but it's juxtaposed with a much darker story which Wheatle relates, later in life, from his prison cell to his devoutly Rastafarian cellmate Simeon (Robbie Gee). Himself incarcerated for arriving at Westminster Abbey with a pickaxe and trying to attack the tomb of Edward the Confessor.
Not as clunkily expositional as these scenes tend to be, we're shown Wheatle's introduction to police brutality (something of a leitmotif in the Small Axe series and, indeed, in stories of black British lives of the time), we see black and white photos of the New Cross house fire of 1981 that killed thirteen young black people between the ages of 14 and 22 and the Black People's Day of Action that protested police and media inaction over the tragedy (both accompanied by Linton Kwesi Johnson's powerful 'New Crass Massakah'), we hear about the death of the white New Zealand anti-racist campaigner at the suspected hands of the Special Patrol Group of the Metropolitan Police in 1979, and we see how these toxic events fed into the anger that eventually created the Brixton Riots.
The Brixton Riots that Wheatle was sent to prison for his involvement in, and it's suggested this spell in prison, and Simeon's recommendation of CLR James' The Black Jacobins (its second appearance in Small Axe following Darcus Howe's recommendation of it in Mangrove), as the event that awakened Wheatle's dormant love of writing (an earlier scene sees the young Wheatle (Asad-Shareef Muhammad) inspired by listening to Roald Dahl on Desert Island Discs) and the catalyst for a change of direction in his life.
Much of the story is suggested rather than shown and though that's worked incredibly well in other Small Axe films this one, perhaps, needed a stricter narrative device to really hit home with the power it deserved. Alex Wheatle's story is certainly fascinating but Alex Wheatle, the film, very good though it was, was the least compelling of the four Small Axe stories so far. But then it does find itself in incredibly exalted company.
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