In Bird, Barry Keoghan Navigates a Tricky Parent-Child Bond

The director Andrea Arnold took a detour from her native England for her last narrative film, traveling all the way to the new world—an odyssey that resulted in the lovely road movie American Honey. There was then a digression to some best-forgotten American TV work and a striking documentary about a cow, called Cow. Now, though, it’s time for her to return to the council estates of small-city Britain for Bird, a strange and searching coming-of-age drama that premiered at the Cannes Film Festival on May 16.

Bird was filmed partly in Kent, where Arnold herself grew up in public housing, the daughter of a single mother. Impressive newcomer Nykiya Adams plays Bailey, a 12-year-old living with her affable but unreliable father, Bug (Barry Keoghan), who has fallen in love with a single mother, Peyton (Jasmine Jobson)—a joining of families that threatens to further disrupt an already erratic household. Bailey reacts as any kid from an unstable home might: she’s sullen and stubborn and retreats to the up-to-no-good older boys she idolizes (a fledgling band of marauders that includes her half-sweet half-brother, Hunter, played by Jason Buda) and to the vastness of her inner life. She is particularly transfixed by other living creatures, lyrically filmed by Arnold and cinematographer Robbie Ryan.

In turning away from her father, and yearning for some kind of deliverance from what is not exactly a desperate life but is certainly a difficult one, Bailey wanders into what might be called fantasy. Arnold takes an interesting pivot here toward magical realism, creating an imaginary friend for Bailey who provides companionship and a little intrigue as she works through a rough patch. (In addition to the family shakeups, she’s just gotten her period for the first time.)

The friend takes the form of a curious man called Bird, played with fittingly avian bob and lilt by Franz Rogowski. But Bird doesn’t traffic in too much tender-hearted cliché, and Bird doesn’t really offer wise counsel. He doesn’t do much of anything at first, really, beyond giving Bailey a little ballast as her world teeters on the brink of change. Arnold carefully balances the abstraction of Bird’s existence—there is certainly something otherworldly about him, but he is also a tangible person whom other people can see—with a hard-nosed (if loose) plot involving abuse and teenage pregnancy. Bird is a puzzling film, but gradually draws us toward a significant catharsis.

Among Arnold’s virtues as a filmmaker is her dexterous use of music. There are several scenes set to pop songs in Bird, in which people commune over a familiar tune that is suddenly fresh and vital—think of the lovely car singalong scene in American Honey, only in more domestic settings. These moments stir up complicated emotions, functioning at once as lament, release, celebration twinged with nostalgia. If some of Arnold’s bigger swings in Bird are harder to connect with, she brings us back with these transcendent scenes, precisely filmed and yet somehow seeming discovered.

That is a hallmark of Arnold’s career: an unfussy approach to high style. Her restraint has loosened some for Bird, both in its approach to the supernatural and the way the film, on only a few occasions, too heavily telegraphs an emotional beat. But the latter indulgence is easily forgiven when there’s so much considered beauty surrounding those moments. The film is delicate where it really counts, its sensitivity no doubt partly the result of Arnold’s revisiting of her own childhood experience.

She’s a careful steward of Bailey, carrying her toward danger but keeping that journey in proportionate scale. Scary things happen in Bird, but they do not play as trials merely foisted upon a character for the sake of cinematic drama. Arnold is too intimate an excavator for that, too subtle a guide. She drops the audience into Bailey’s life in medias res and quietly helps us find our bearings. As we slowly feel out the borders of Bird, its limits and possibilities, it becomes easier to believe the visceral peril and the whispery unknowns of the film.

Arnold is not a moralist. She lets Bug—who had children very young—be both a tender and witless father. Keoghan nails that equation, deftly helping steer the film toward its aching, bleary end. Bird is consoling and creepy at once, a natural mode for an actor as slippery and alluring as Rogowski. As she did in American Honey, Arnold seamlessly blends bigger-name actors and their more fledgling costars; Adams and Buda are terrific finds. Together with Arnold’s wise guidance, they make something odd and affecting, a picture of people finding means both practical and fantastical to bear up and—though not in the corny British way, I promise—carry on.