There are two men orbiting the life of Bailey (Nykiya Adams), the 12-year-old main character of Bird, and each is, in his own way, childlike. Bug, played by a tatted-up Barry Keoghan, had Bailey when he was still little more than a kid himself and reigns over the squat they share with her teenage half-brother, Hunter (Jason Buda), like the longest tenured in a collection of roommates rather than a parent. Bird, played by Franz Rogowski, is a gentle drifter in a skirt and a backpack whom Bailey crosses paths with in a field one morning and, after some initial hostility on her part, helps on his quest to find the parents he claims once lived in a building nearby. Both are forces of nature — Bug in an impulsive sense and Bird in a more literal manner that hints of something otherworldly about his existence. The more we see of the swath of northern Kent that Bailey’s been growing in, the more that boyishness, however unreliable, looks preferable to the model of grown manhood that’s its alternative. Bailey’s mother (Jasmine Jobson), for instance, lives in a decrepit house with Bailey’s three younger siblings and a boyfriend she’s terrified of — a phenomenon common enough that Hunter and his friends have started a vigilante crew that pays visits to abusers to dole out retribution.
Bird is the newest feature from Andrea Arnold — her first scripted film since the 2016 U.S. road odyssey American Honey — and it serves up an endearing, ungainly mix of the gritty and the magical. In outlining what is essentially a coming-of-age story for Bailey, it manages to be both kitchen-sink drama and fairy tale. Though what it resembles more than anything is a dream that Arnold had and that she only semi-successfully translated to the screen. Arnold, who has spent the past few years directing TV and delving into documentary with her 2021 Cow, is too vital a filmmaker to produce something that isn’t compelling, and Bird features imagery and sequences, from the blown-out sunniness of the squat to Bug and Bailey blasting a punk song while zooming through town on a scooter, that burble irresistibly with life. But the film, for all that it recalls Arnold’s great 2009 mother-daughter portrait Fish Tank, feels like a sketch — a collection of elements and ideas that she can’t quite fit together but also can’t bring herself to streamline into something that actually coheres.
The trickiest of those elements is Bird himself. Rogowski’s a thrillingly off-kilter actor who gave one of last year’s most mesmerizing performances as a bad boyfriend to both Ben Whishaw and Adèle Exarchopoulos in Passages, but what he does in Bird veers into the creepy in ways that don’t always seem intentional. His character, who doesn’t carry a phone and who appears to have walked to Southeast England from places unknown, is positioned like a visitor from another planet with a fey aura and a sweet nature that Rogowski projects energetically from every pore of his beautifully open face, as though he could overcome the character’s implicit tweeness. Arnold has her own technique for cutting through the potential treacle, which is to shoot Bird standing on rooftops, which provides the film with a dramatic-looking motif, never more so when he does this naked. At Cannes, where Bird premiered, Arnold said that the film started with “the image of a tall, thin man with a long penis, standing on a roof,” and while the sight is clearly meant to throw the audience off-balance, Bird never entirely squares the impact that a nude man staring down through the window of a sleeping adolescent girl has on its tonal shifts.
Keoghan fares better as the chaotic Bug, dancing shirtless in his room by himself, singing Blur at his wedding to a woman he met three months ago, procuring a psychedelic toad as part of a moneymaking scheme, and being charming while also being alarmingly erratic. But Bird belongs to Bailey, and to first-timer Adams, who does a winning job of being unpredictable herself, even if the film would be better off delving deeper into one of the relationships in her life rather than dipping into all of them in turn. Bailey herself is a shape-shifter of sorts, right on the border between child and teenager in age and, with her androgynous looks, occupying an ambiguous place between genders as well. She’s still figuring out the space she wants to take up in the world, and Adams plays the character as someone who, despite having learned to be cautious, still feels the wonder of seeing so many things for the first time — whether that be fish in the shallows during a trip to the seaside or Bird doing a twirl in the dawn light. There’s value to holding onto that child’s-eye view, and Bird, more than anything, is an ode to that fact.
