A conversation early in Harris Dickinson’s stunning directorial debut Urchin — winner of the FIPRESCI Prize at Cannes this year — cuts straight to the heart. Mike (Frank Dillane), a man fraying at society’s edges, meets Simon (Okezie Morro) on the street. Simon speaks of “a gap of empathy” in modern life. Dickinson doesn’t preach to close it. He shows one man’s spiral — raw, unadorned, tragically ordinary — and dares us to find ourselves in the water circling the drain.
Inspired by Mike Leigh, Sean Baker, and the Safdie Brothers, Urchin rejects sentimentality. It’s a character study that honors Mike’s truth without frills or salvation.
Where do you notice the empathy gap in your own world — between you and others, or within yourself?
What small choices have sent your own life circling closer to the edge?
The Man Against the System
Mike has lived rough for years, losing battle after battle to addiction. Moments after Simon’s words about empathy, Mike sucker-punches him, steals his watch, pawns it for $40. Arrest follows. Nine months in prison cleans him physically. Released, he lands in a hostel for reentry, scores a chef job, practices “Yes, chef” in the mirror with crooked hope.
He’s good — competent, eager. Motivational tapes play in his ears, promising reinvention. For a moment, the story feels possible.
When have you stood freshly “clean” from some old failure, believing the new chapter could begin?
What fragile rituals — a job, a phrase, a recording — have kept your own recovery alive?
The Conflict That Breaks Him
Mike’s flaw isn’t the drugs. It’s how he meets resistance. A customer hates his steak? He argues, doesn’t bend. A co-worker takes endless breaks? Mike clashes instead of ignoring. Then comes the meeting — Mike and Simon, face to face, designed to heal them both.
Frank Dillane’s face becomes a map of guilt, shame, unraveling. One conversation, one mirror held to his violence, sends him spiraling again. We’ve seen this man before. He’s every soul who fights systems but crumbles against self-knowledge.
When does feedback feel like attack, and how does that instinct protect or destroy you?
What conversation could you not survive without retreating to old escapes?
Frank Dillane’s Raw Truth
Dillane fills every frame without forcing a single moment. Jittery, unpredictable, he captures the addict who self-destructs not from craving alone, but from discomfort with his own skin. Drugs fill the void where emotional tools should live.
Dickinson opens with water swirling from a shower drain into nature — a perfect image. Flowing away comes easily for some. Broken systems enable it. Temptation shouts louder than pre-recorded hope.
What flows too easily away from you — time, trust, possibility?
When have you blamed the drain instead of the choices that fed it?
Harris Dickinson’s Directorial Eye
At 29, Dickinson proves himself a natural. Partnered with cinematographer Josée Deshaies (Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast), he crafts uncluttered frames that breathe. No sweaty close-ups of suffering. Static shots and slow zooms let us sit with Mike — in hostels, kitchens, karaoke nights.
One scene haunts: Mike on a couch, singing Atomic Kitten’s “Whole Again” under a tiny mirror ball, goofily happy with two co-workers. Mundane joy, captured perfectly. We feel how precious that flicker feels to a man starved for it.
The score overreaches in the final act — chunky guitars pushing tension Dillane already sells. But it’s a small flaw in a confident debut.
What ordinary moment of joy would mean salvation to the version of you at your lowest?
How do you film the quiet victories others overlook in your story?
The Echo of “Beach Rats”
Urchin echoes Dickinson’s own breakthrough, Eliza Hittman’s 2017 Beach Rats, where he first revealed this instinctive understanding of broken young men. That film earned Independent Spirit nominations for his lead and cinematography. This one deserves the same — and more.
Dickinson learned on Hittman’s set. He captures human complexity without tipping into melodrama, just as she did. Both films reject easy answers, trusting audiences to sit with moral grayness.
Which early experience taught you to direct your own life with more compassion?
What did you carry from your first “performance” into the directing chair of your own story?
The Influences That Shape Him
Dickinson channels Mike Leigh’s kitchen-sink honesty, Ken Loach’s unflinching social eye, Sean Baker’s empathy for society’s fringes, the Safdie Brothers’ restless energy. Yet Urchin feels personal, not derivative.
Mike isn’t a saint or victim. He’s competently disastrous — good at his job, terrible at connection. His tragedy lies in that gap: skilled enough to rebuild, fragile enough to shatter.
Whose storytelling style shapes how you tell your own struggles — honest, chaotic, tender?
When do you become the fringe character in someone else’s narrative?
The Spaces That Witness
Dickinson’s visual language transforms setting into character. Hostels aren’t picturesque poverty — they’re concrete boxes echoing with half-made plans. Kitchens steam with competence masking desperation. Streets stretch indifferent to one man’s war.
Static frames force us to notice details: flickering neons, unwashed mugs, the slow zoom on Mike’s unraveling face. We don’t just watch him fall. We live in the spaces that let it happen.
What environment in your life quietly enables your downward spirals?
Which room, street, or silence has witnessed more of your private collapses than anyone knows?
The Karaoke Moment
That couch scene under the mirror ball lingers longest. Mike, half-drunk on normalcy, belts “Whole Again” with strangers who become friends for one song. Laughter. Clumsy harmony. Light fractures across their faces.
For 180 seconds, Mike isn’t addict, ex-con, failure. He’s a man singing badly and feeling whole. Dickinson doesn’t underline it. The moment lives, then passes.
When were you last briefly, gloriously ordinary — and how did it save you?
What song could pull the broken pieces of you into harmony, if only for three minutes?
The Empathy Gap Revisited
Simon’s early line returns, transformed. The gap isn’t just between “haves” and “have-nots.” It’s inside Mike — between the man who cooks perfect steaks and the boy who punches strangers. Between competence and collapse.
Dickinson refuses savior narratives. No miracle recovery. No wise mentor. Just one man fighting systems that flow toward the drain, and himself.
Where does your own empathy fail first — toward others, or yourself?
What gap between your skills and your fragility scares you most?
The Drain as Metaphor
That opening shower image haunts every frame. Clean water vanishes effortlessly into darkness. Mike’s life follows the same physics. Prison resets the flow temporarily. The hostel diverts it. Work channels it. But conflict, guilt, temptation — they all tip him back toward the hole.
Dickinson’s camera watches without pity or panic. This isn’t special. This is common. Broken systems plus broken people equals predictable tragedy.
What pulls you toward your own drain when life flows smoothly?
How many clean starts will it take before you learn the current always returns?
Why “Urchin” Matters
Harris Dickinson didn’t just act his way to Cannes. He directed there. At 29. With a film this assured, this humane, this unwilling to cheat. Urchin proves storytelling heals the empathy gap not through explanation, but presence — sitting with someone’s whole messy truth.
Frank Dillane proves acting can break your heart without breaking character. The film proves society’s failures don’t need dramatic music to destroy lives.
What truth about your struggles would you tell if no one expected redemption?
Whose story deserves your full attention, without the pressure of fixing it?
Your Gap, Your Urchin
Mike’s spiral becomes yours. The customer complaint you couldn’t swallow. The co-worker who triggered old rage. The guilt that sent you back to familiar escapes. The job you excelled at until feelings interfered.
Dickinson asks you to sit with your own Mike — the competent disaster within. Not to fix him. Not to explain him. Just to witness.
What part of you lives on the fringe of your own empathy?
When will you stop demanding happy endings from your hardest stories?
The Mirror Ball Legacy
Urchin leaves mirror ball glitter in your eyes — fragments of goofy joy amid life’s concrete. Mike may fall again. Systems may fail him. But those 180 seconds of bad singing proved joy possible, however brief.
Harris Dickinson closes the empathy gap not with solutions, but with attention. He sees Mike completely — flaws, flickers, fall. That seeing becomes grace.
What 180 seconds of your life glitter still, no matter how far you’ve fallen since?
Whose full seeing — flaws and flickers — could save you from another spiral?
Urchin earns its Cannes prize because it dares what few films do: showing a common tragedy without needing to rescue it. Mike’s story ends open, like life. His drain waits. His competence waits. His fragile joy waits.
Dickinson leaves us with Simon’s question, reframed: the empathy gap isn’t just “out there.” It’s how we see the urchins within and around us — not projects to fix, but people to witness.
Who needs your witness more than your wisdom today?
What story will you tell without demanding it end “whole again”?
Because every drain holds someone singing under a mirror ball, waiting for the light to find them.
Even when the water keeps flowing away.
The Power of Your Story 