Steve (Netflix)

In "Steve", a film on Netflix, Max Porter adapted from his own novella Shy, asks us to consider what we expect from adaptation.

On the page, we enter inside the mind of a teenage boy. It’s chaotic in there. We’re torn violently between love and self-obliteration, between the feeling of being very big to the feeling of being very small, always in flux and never safe.

The boy, Shy, is at a boarding school for troubled kids in England in 1995. It’s known as their “Last Chance”. Porter’s writing is a provocation to sympathy. He’s asking us, before we cast our judgment, to at least live a little while inside this maelstrom.

For the screen, however, Porter chose to – in his words – “rewrite” rather than to adapt. Steve tells the same story from the point of view of the school’s headteacher, who in the novella is a rare, unwaveringly kind voice. It’s nice to see an author treat cinema as something more than an accessory to their own work.

As Steve becomes the centre of our attention – and how could he not be, when he’s played by the extraordinary Cillian Murphy – Shy (Jay Lycurgo) is sidelined. He becomes the curious, tragic puzzle everyone’s trying to solve: Steve, teachers Amanda (Tracey Ullman, in a rare but effective dramatic turn) and Shola (Simbi Ajikawo, who raps under the name Little Simz), and therapist Jenny (Emily Watson).

What insight we are afforded is entirely through the beautiful work of Lycurgo, who captures the very moment a mind tiptoes too closely to a painful emotion, only to stop dead in its tracks and then slide into disassociation.

Shy’s story plays out the same way, but in the background, and without the internal reasoning to make sense of it all. Steve, meanwhile, is handed a neat, condensed list of burdens plucked from the novella: he’s just been told the school has been sold and will close in six months, while a news crew barge around the place, and a conservative MP (Roger Allam) waffles on to the kids about how they should be grateful he’s saved them all from communism. Porter then hands him extra, unprocessed trauma, with added substance addiction.

Murphy and director Tim Mielants also made last year’s near-flawless Irish drama Small Things Like These. Here, the whole cast is superb. Meanwhile, Mielants has endless quiet patience and a crackerjack visual imagination. That same sense of two things at once ripples through the film. How could it not? At one point, with her own sad smile, Ullman mentions the school’s “beautiful, terrible boys”.

It lands as a pivotal line in a film about problem teenagers with a wisdom adults sometimes ignore: that life is never more complex than when you’re young. Murphy is superb as a good man at the end of his tether.