Sidney Lumet once said that screenwriting was plagued by what he called “rubber-ducky” scenes: pieces of tidy back story that account for a character’s troubles later on, like having one’s ducky taken away as a child. This technique is employed to an egregious effect in “Steve,” a showy character study on Netflix. It’s set in 1996 at Stanton Wood, a British reform school for teenage boys whose behavioral issues have booted them from polite society. Steve (Cillian Murphy, stubbly and careworn) is the devoted head teacher, a good Samaritan and true believer in the institution who’s nonetheless being driven mad by the work.
The film flaunts its kitchen-sink bona fides by setting its story over a single frenzied school day. The director Tim Mielants (the Murphy-starring “Small Things Like These”) lays out the first half of the movie in arty, vérité shots as the students erupt in skirmishes or horse around in class. But once Steve learns that Stanton Wood trustees plan to shut the school down, the movie takes a turn for the stylish. A droning score sets in, and at one point, the camera soars in and out of a classroom, through the rain and over a muddy soccer game. The sequence impresses, but there is an aloofness to the virtuosity, as if it were designed for a filmmaking reel.
On the day “Steve” depicts, a television news crew is shooting a segment on Stanton Wood’s campus, and Mielants punctuates his swanning takes with the grainy interviews they capture. It’s in one of these exposition-heavy sessions that Amanda (Tracey Ullman), the deputy head of Stanton Wood, inexplicably volunteers Steve’s rubber-ducky trauma — explaining away the self-medicating that we see him periodically sneak away to indulge in.
In contrast to Steve’s toiling, the Stanton Wood students come off as silly, bright and spirited. Their rowdy energy is the main reason to seek out this film, which between its flourishes manages to showcase some grade-A acting. After Steve, our focus falls on Shy (a fabulous Jay Lycurgo), a smart but sullen student suffering a personal woe, and the lumbering, truculent Jamie (Luke Ayres), whose eyes glint as he toggles between bravado and docility.
“Steve” was rendered by the screenwriter Max Porter from his 2023 novel, “Shy,” yet in adapting the material, Porter shifted the attention away from the adolescents and toward their harried keeper. This redirection hits trouble in a crescendoing third act, when Shy makes a critical decision without the psychological complexity to shore up his actions. In hewing closely to Steve, the whole affair takes on a grating note of self-sacrifice, of perseverance through suffering. When, in one scene, the news crew asks Steve to describe himself in three words, he answers with a wan smile, “Very, very tired.” That’s how one feels after finishing this clunky melodrama.
Steve
Rated R for bad apples and tired teachers. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. Watch on Netflix.
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