The group of lads at the center of Clio Barnard’s “I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning” dance their way through addiction, housing precarity, class tensions and good old romantic betrayal. In theory, the British director’s fifth feature — premiered in Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes — is a film of big, bubbling emotions and anti-capitalist rage. In execution, it’s a choppy outline of five working-class lives in the U.K. cobbled together by gloopy sentimentality. The ingredients for a pounding kitchen-sink melodrama are here, but nothing really matches the scalding imagery evoked by the title — and scattered throughout via archival footage of the dozens of high-rise housing towers demolished in Birmingham, where the film is set, since the turn of the century.
Adapted from the novel of the same name by Kieran Goddard, the script by Enda Walsh (“Small Things Like These”) shifts between five characters, a clan of childhood besties in their thirties still clinging to their hard-partying ways. Patrick (Anthony Boyle), a politically opinionated food delivery courier, lives with his high school sweetheart-now-wife, Shiv (Lola Petticrew) and their two young daughters in an inner-city estate. Their neighbours include Oli (Jay Lycurgo), a loveable goofball who deals heroin to make ends meet, and Conor (Daryl McCormack), whose struggles with alcohol intensify as his pregnant wife Sophie (Lucie Shorthouse) nears her due date.
