Steve McQueen WWII drama Blitz is more unconventional than it appears

Blitz, set in London during World War II, might technically be Steve McQueen ’s first war movie. But struggle and survival has long marked the filmmaker’s tough and tortured work.

No matter the circumstance — slavery in “12 Years a Slave,” the 1960s-1980s London of West Indian immigrants in “Small Axe,” the Irish hunger strike of “Shame” — McQueen has been drawn to moments of history less for their dramatic extremes than for how they test the morality of those in and around the fight. Did they turn a blind eye? Did they risk themselves? Do we remember?

McQueen’s films tend to ask questions — often uncomfortable ones. That’s been true in his nonfiction work, too. His 2023 short film “Grenfell” captured the aftermath of the tragic Grenfell Tower blaze. Last year’s “Occupied City” compared present-day street addresses in Amsterdam to what happened in those precise locations during the Nazi occupation of WWII.

In that film, McQueen juxtaposed past and present, death and life, and some of the same collisions are found in the 1940-set “Blitz,” which opened Friday in theaters and streams Nov. 22 on Apple TV+. It’s told largely from the perspective of a 9-year-old boy, George (Elliott Heffernan), whose single mother, Rita (a steely Saoirse Ronan ), has made the anguished decision to send him to the countryside with thousands of other schoolchildren fleeing the Blitz.

A year into the war, the bombing is already intense, and so is the questionable nature of how some are responding to the omnipresent danger and the loosening of order. The film opens in a fiery blaze as firefighters wrestle with an out-of-control hose, and a mass of people rush toward the underground to take cover from the bombers overhead. Outside the station, the gates are locked, and the nearby police refuse to open them. It’s an early hint that McQueen’s treatment of the war will be more complicated and unsparing than the average WWII drama.

“Blitz” properly gets underway once Rita leaves George at the train station. The parting is bitter (“I hate you,” George says on the platform) only because their bond is so evidently strong. It’s not long once aboard the train that George sees a chance to flee and hops off. “Blitz” proceeds as George’s odyssey in trying to get home.

It’s an awkwardly condensed tale — the film takes place over one day but feels like a lifetime — that clunkily cuts between George and Rita. “Blitz” feels stuck between a conventional war drama and something more adventurous and probing. It doesn’t coalesce the way McQueen’s best work does, but the frictions that drive “Blitz” make it a singular and sporadically moving experience.

A representative sequence happens early in the film. George, who’s Black and surely feels some growing anxiety leaving London, climbs into a passing train only to find three young brothers are also stowaways there. After a tense moment, they find camaraderie together. Riding atop the train, they seem almost carefree. But moments later, when they’re fleeing authorities at the trainyard, one of the boys is killed in an instant by a moving train.

Throughout, “Blitz” toggles between moments of tenderness and violence, a back and forth that McQueen suggests isn’t just part of wartime. Following the trainyard moment, the film slides into a flashback of Rita and George’s otherwise unseen Grenadian immigrant father, Marcus (CJ Beckford). On their way home from a joyous night dancing at a jazz club, a man intentionally bumps into Marcus. In the ensuing tussle Marcus is arrested, and later, swiftly deported. In an instant, cruelty and racism can wreck a life just as surely as a Nazi bomb from above.

The film stays close to George as he makes his way closer to home in Stepney Green in the East End. “Blitz” is far less concerned with the aerial bombardment above than the festering prejudices and injustices on the ground. In the movie’s most Dickens-esque sequence, George is taken in, and held prisoner, by a Fagin-like criminal (Stephen Graham) whose band of thieves steal from the dead and plunder freshly bombed-out flats. There are chillingly ghostly sequences, most of all one set in the Café de Paris. One moment it’s a teaming, multiracial jazz club, the next — as captured in one sweeping, grotesque shot by Yorick Le Saux — it’s a bloody ruin.

There are moments of uplift, or at least temporary relief. One comes when Rita, who works in a munitions factory with a Rosie the Riveter headscarf, sings for a BBC radio program from the factory floor. Once Rita learns that George is lost, there’s an ill-fitting side plot of her feuding with an unsympathetic boss, arguing with those in charge of the evacuation and her attempting to find George with the help of a police officer (Harris Dickinson, in a role too vague to resonate).

Again and again we see, though, that going against a tide of indifference takes the conviction and courage of individuals. That includes the activist Mikey Davies (Leigh Gill), who makes a stirring speech in a shelter. And, most of all, it includes a Nigerian ARP warden Ife (Benjamin Clémentine), who George meets outside a store advertising coffee and sugar from Africa with caricatures of Black faces. Clémentine, the talented singer-songwriter, has a radiant presence that warms a fiercely unsentimental film. Ife imbues George with a pride and confidence with himself as a young Black man. For his part, the young Heffernan shows no strain in carrying the movie, his first.

Ultimately, that there is a war on in “Blitz” may not be its defining feature. The London under siege in McQueen's film is as much at risk from injustice as it is German planes. For George, Rita and the others pushing back, resistance isn't just wartime survival. It's a way of life.

“Blitz,” an Apple Studios release is rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association for thematic elements including some racism, violence, some strong language, brief sexuality and smoking. Running time: 120 minutes. Three stars out of four.