Producers: Archie Pearch and Scott O’Donnell   Director: Harris Dickinson   Screenplay: Harris Dickinson   Cast: Frank Dillane, Megan Northam, Okezie Morro, Amr Waked, Shonagh Marie, Karyna Khymchuk, Buckso Dhillon, Holly de Jong, Lacey Bond and Harris Dickinson   Distributor: 1-2 Special

Grade: B

The genealogy of actor Harris Dickinson’s debut as a writer-director is fairly obvious: “Urchin” hearkens back to the kitchen sink dramas of Ken Loach, but most clearly to Mike Leigh’s 1993 “Naked.”  (Dickinson also appears in the film, uncredited.)

The protagonist is Mike (Frank Dillane, in an exceptionally vivid, multifaceted performance), a homeless drug addict living in the streets.  Awakening one morning to the voice of a preacher, he retrieves his bag and goes on a search for Nathan (Dickinson), a fellow addict he accuses of stealing his wallet and gets into a fight with.  Their tussle is broken up by passerby Simon (Okezie Morro) who offers Mike lunch, but when they walk to a diner Mike turns on the man, knocks him out and steals his wallet and watch, which he immediately pawns.  But the assault has been captured on camera, and Mike is quickly arrested, convicted and sentenced to a fourteen-month prison term.

Dickinson spends little time on Mike’s time behind bars, however, offering a cheeky scene of his entrance to jail (complete with a surrealistic moment that follows water flowing down a shower drain to what are apparently the subterranean recesses of his mind) and a sour phone call to his mother before skipping to his release after seven months.  The conference that follows with his assigned social worker Nadine (Buckso Dhillon) is perfunctory; anxious to get on to other things, she remarks that he’s well aware of the drill, having gone through it before, and assigns him temporary lodging at a hostel while implying that she doesn’t expect that he’ll manage to stay out of the system for long. She shows no interest in his implausible dream of establishing an upscale limo service.

Mike puts some effort into rehabilitation.  He goes to a charity shop for some new clothes and manages to convince Chef Franco (Amr Waked) to give him a job in his hotel restaurant.  He spends time listening to self-help tapes in his room, listening to reassuring messages about the possibility of changing his life. He also makes some friends, going out with two of them, Ramona (Karyna Khymchuk) and Chantelle (Sonagh Marie), to a karaoke bar.  But the person he grows closest to is his co-worker Andrea (Megan Northam), a free spirit who invites him to the caravan she calls home, where they get intimate and talk about their pasts and their hopes.

But it’s not to last.  Mike fails to respond well when Nadine arranges a meeting with Simon, is rude to a diner who complains about the food at the restaurant, and gets into a scuffle with a co-worker he accuses of slacking.  Franco lets him go, and the only work he can scrounge is on a litter-pickup team.  Worst of all, during an outdoor session with some raggedy friends of Andrea, he tries some ketamine and gets hooked.  It’s the beginning of a downward spiral that includes a visit to Nathan, now sober (at least temporarily) and living with a woman (Lacey Bond) who offers him some stability.  Mike’s drug and alcohol dependence unleashes his aggressive side, and he causes a ruckus in a club and then at a store where he tries to steal some booze. 

The film closes with a sequence that returns to the surrealism Dickinson has occasionally employed earlier—the sequences in a dark cavern that apparently represents Mike’s memories and fears, encounters with a strange old woman (Holly de Jong) who plays Paganini on her violin.  Now, disheveled and distraught, he sees her again and follows her into a chapel where Nathan, dressed in a robe, forces him through a door that leaves him spinning into the void, the end of his descent.

Dickinson has made a confident if somewhat derivative directorial debut, securing consistently fine work from his technical collaborators—cinematographer Josée Deshaies, production designer Anna Rhodes, costumer Cobbie Yates, editor Rafael Torreds Calderón and a visual effects team headed by Agnes Asplund—and his cast, especially the scruffily charismatic Dillane, who endows Mike with an undercurrent of charm that suggests how he can, when on his best behavior, ingratiate himself to others even when his motives are suspect.  Alan Myson’s score is used sparingly, but goes into dissonant overdrive as Mike’s mental state deteriorates.  The use of the Caprice 24 by Paganini at moments of special stress works well.

In short, an impressive directorial debut by the latest actor to try his hand behind the camera. 

Producers: Colin Hanks, Sean Stuart, Glen Zipper, Ryan Reynolds, George Dewey, Johnny Pariseau and Shane Reid   Director: Colin Hanks   Cast: Steve Martin, Tom Hanks, Catherine O’Hara, Martin Short, Eugene Levy, Dan Ackroyd, Bill Murray, Dave Thomas, Andrea Martin, Macaulay Culkin, Don Lake, Chris Columbus, Conan O’Brien, Mel Brooks, Rose Candy, Chris Candy, Jennifer Candy-Sullivan, Steve Aker, Pat Kelly, Terry Enright, Tom Davidson, Rita Davidson, Ennio Gregoris and Catherine McCartney    Distributor: Amazon MGM Studios

Grade: B

The words of the old standard, “Seldom is heard a discouraging word,” might be applied to Colin Hanks’s loving tribute to John Candy, whose untimely death at only forty-three in 1994 robbed the world of one of its finest comic actors.  It begins with interview footage of Bill Murray trying to think of anything negative to say about his friend; eventually he muses that Candy once over-milked a scene, annoying the director.  Barely a venial sin.

Murray goes on to rhapsodize about Candy, and the other interviewees listed above—colleagues, family (his wife and two children), childhood friends—follow suit.  The result subtitled with a line that Candy famously spoke as Del Griffith after being berated by Steve Martin’s Neal Page in “Planes, Trains & Automobiles,” is a cinematic love letter to the man—one that, after watching the succession of tributes the younger Hanks has accumulated, seems to be well deserved.

That’s not to say that Candy sailed through life without emotional turbulence.  The death of his father at only thirty-five haunted him.  He was beset by anxiety about his own talent.  He was perhaps too eager to say “yes” to friends who asked hm to accept small guest roles in films that he undertook with little preparation, usually falling back on versions of characters he’d developed in his early days in sketch comedy.  (Not that they weren’t still funny, or endearing, or both.)

But an eagerness to please is hardly a major flaw, and artists in general, and comedians in particular, seem prone to self-doubt and premonitions of mortality.  Candy overcame his fears to deliver work that, at its best, has stood the test of time, remaining as fresh, funny and, in some cases, poignant as when it was new. It’s true that by the nineties he was appearing in films that were unworthy of him, including the last, “Wagons East,” which was completed with the use of doubles and computer imaging after he died of a heart attack during the shoot.

But by then he’d built a lasting legacy both on and off the screen.  That’s clear not only from the raft of clips Hanks has assembled from Candy’s days with Second City and SCTV through his collaborations with writer-director John Hughes, another figure who died young and for whom Candy became a sort of muse, but from the recollections of those who remember him as thoughtful and committed.  One hesitates to pick favorites, but certainly his brilliant SCTV work, and among movies “Planes, Trains & Automobiles,” stand out.  And among the most memorable interviews are those with O’Brien, who recalls how considerate Candy was of a star-struck fan; Culkin who, appearing far more animated than is often the case nowadays, talks of his “Uncle Buck” co-star’s lack of condescension in dealing with child actors and his sensitivity toward them, off the screen as well as on it; and Don Lake, whose comments about his last days on the “Wagons East” shoot are moving.

On the technical side, “I Like Me” isn’t much more than adequate; the archival stills and clips from films and TV aren’t ideally crisp, and the contemporary interview footage, as shot by cinematographer Justin Kane, is just okay.  But editors Shane Reid and Darrin Roberts string it all together well enough, and Tyler Strickland contributes a pleasant score.

 Some might argue that Hanks’s portrait of John Candy borders on hagiography.  But it’s hard to see how a different approach would have been possible in dealing with a man who appears to have been a genuinely nice person.  The film is a warmhearted tribute to a man whose own warmth seems to have won over everyone who knew or worked with him.