Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Small Axe: Red, White and Blue’ on Amazon Prime, More Essential Viewing from Visionary Filmmaker Steve McQueen

Steve McQueen’s Small Axe series on Amazon Prime is a gift. Third film/episode Red, White and Blue follows suit with previous entries Mangrove (a rousing courtroom drama) and Lovers Rock (a joyous celebration of liberation through music and one of 2020’s best films) by continuing McQueen’s exploration of rich, complex stories from London’s West Indian community. The new entry stars John Boyega of Star Wars fame as real-life London police officer Leroy Logan, who joined the force to address its racism from within — but as you may expect, it was a difficult endeavor. This is his story.

SMALL AXE: RED, WHITE AND BLUE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Leroy Logan was just a kid the first time he was stopped and searched. A schoolboy. Two white cops rifled through his musical instrument case and bookbag as he stood on the sidewalk outside his school waiting for his dad to pick him up. Ken Logan (Steve Toussaint) spirits his boy away from the officers and tells him, “Don’t be no roughneck, and don’t bring no police to my yard.” He took it to heart. Years later, the adult Leroy (Boyega) is a rock-solid citizen: Research scientist, married, soon to be a father. It’s the early ’80s. He and wife Gretl (Antonia Thomas) play Scrabble with his parents, who shift uncomfortably when Gretl plays the word “sex.” Ken could win the game by putting a “y” on the end, but he doesn’t. This is the type of buttoned-up family where there’s plenty of love, but not much in the way of openness.

Ken, a truck driver, pulls his rig over to get a sandwich. As he orders, we see a cop car pull up a block behind him. He looks over his shoulder. The camera rack-focuses on the two white policemen getting out of the cruiser. That sinking feeling. The truck. They say it’s blocking the road. It’s not. Ken gets out a tape measure to prove it. They savagely beat him. Leroy is in the middle of giving students a laboratory tour when his pager goes off; he walks into a hospital room and his father’s face is a swollen and bloody mess. Leroy has been antsy, dissatisfied with his career; Jesse (Nadine Marshall), mother of his best friend, musician Leee John (Tyrone Huntley), works as a Metropolitan Police liaison, and she all but recruits him. He’d be “a benefit to the community.” He was researching the effects of chemotherapy on cancer patients, but never mind — being a cop would allow him to bridge the gap between authorities and the disaffected people in his neighborhood.

Leroy’s decision doesn’t go over well with his father. They don’t speak for a while, but Ken hugs his son when he leaves for six weeks of police training. “I’m not here to make friends,” Leroy says to a roomful of fellow cadets, all white. Unsurprisingly, he excels. He’s the best recruit of the batch. His first official day on the force, he feels the eyes of fellow officers following him. He walks the streets of his neighborhood and is called Judas. He agrees to be the poster boy for the Met’s recruitment of “colored people.” Racist officers sneer arrogantly and scrawl epithets on his locker. He befriends Asif Kamali (Assad Zaman), an Indian officer who’s also hoping to enact some change. They both wonder if it’s worth it. Ken’s wise words for his boy: “Big change — that is a slow-turning wheel.”

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Detroit, Queen and Slim, Blindspotting, If Beale Street Could Talk.

Performance Worth Watching: Boyega’s nonverbal performance conveys a swirling storm of contradictions: fortitude, rage, righteousness, doubt. Whether Small Axe falls under Oscar or Emmy consideration, his name should be in the mix.

Memorable Dialogue: Leroy tells Leee about his plans for a career change:

Leroy: I wanna join the force.

Leee: You gonna be a Jedi or something?

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Small Axe continues to find McQueen in prime form. Red, White and Blue clocks in at a lean, muscular 80 minutes, and he makes every moment count: Social dynamics, racial disparity, family turbulence, Leroy’s inner turmoil — a turmoil spurred by the story’s central irony, that in order to help his father, he risks alienating him. The two men represent the pragmatism of the now and the hope for a better future. Leroy’s naive; Leroy’s optimistic. Has one ever existed without the other? It’s the 1980s, and he’s the first-ever Black cop in the Met. He’s climbing Everest without a guide or enough gear. But someone has to be the first to scale the mountain.

There’s another irony here. Leroy was partly motivated to set down his microscope because it was a solitary job. Now, he’s surrounded by people who don’t look like him and don’t empathize with him and make his job and life profoundly frustrating. But he needed to challenge himself, and it wasn’t some abstract notion spurring him. It was love. It was his father. It was personal. Are we to be inspired by his story? Not necessarily, not by the way McQueen presents it, with no easy answers, and maybe no answers at all. McQueen stages a gutsy and tense chase in which Leroy tracks a dangerous perp through a warehouse and factory, and at times it resembles a superhero action sequence. That’s inspiring, of course. But he has to tackle the criminal alone, because his calls for backup were purposely ignored. The scene ultimately underscores the thanklessness of his efforts.

We can look up the real Leroy Logan and see he formed the National Black Police Association in the late ’90s, and earned a Most Excellent Order of the British Empire medal. But watching this film, all we see is a young man, as collected as he is brash, sacrificing his comfort, and possibly his sanity, for what looks like a fruitless cause. Watching Boyega scream and cry into a megaphone at a Black Lives Matter rally in London’s Hyde Park this past summer — “I don’t know if I’ll have a career after this, but f— that,” he said — shows there’s still much progress to be made, and illustrates how Red, White and Blue is profound confluence of then and now. It’s hopeful because it has to be.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Red, White and Blue strikes another variation on McQueen’s Small Axe theme, and it’s just as strong as its predecessors. The series continues to be essential viewing.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Stream Small Axe: Red, White and Blue on Amazon Prime