Andrea Arnold’s Bird begins with what might seem like a tiny feint: a 12-year-old girl named Bailey (Nykiya Adams) films a flock of seabirds on her phone. They hover over the beaches of the British county of Kent, near the bunker-like apartment building where Bailey lives with Hunter (Jason Buda), his wannabe half-brother, and Bug (Barry Keough), his tattooed son. dad. And given the way this young amateur filmmaker has framed her avian subjects between openings in a fence, it almost looks like she’s watching them from a cell window. Bailey would also like to feel as free as these sky creatures. You naturally assume that the title refers to her, in the most ambitious way. She is the one who wants to spread her wings and fly, take flight.

But no, there’s actually a character named Bird, who comes into his life in the most unusual way. Bailey has just learned that her father is getting married to his new girlfriend, Kayleigh (Frankie Box), she is supposed to wear a purple leopard skin jumpsuit as bridesmaid, and the kid is having none of it. As a sign of rebellion, Bailey shaves his head. She also sees Hunter slicing another teenager’s face, then walking away from the crime scene.

And that’s when she meets a mysterious stranger (Franz Rogowski) in a skirt, wandering in a field. This hike called “Bird” initially freaks Bailey out. Then he starts posing and dancing like a loon in front of his camera, before running away. Later, she sees him perched on the corner of a multi-story building, looking around. (At a press conference after the film’s premiere in Cannes, Arnold said that this film began with the image of a “very tall, thin man with a long penis standing on a roof.” We can confirm that most, but not all, aspects of that vision remained intact on screen.) There’s something about him that Bailey can’t shake. She recognizes a stranger with a kindred spirit when she sees one.

A British filmmaker with a gift for making the environments of ordinary people both brutal and lyrical, Arnold seems to be very much in his coming-of-age comfort zone here – given the dynamic between the thirty-something Bird and the teenage Bailey, as well as coming from a working class background, you’d be forgiven for thinking this was something of a companion piece to his superficially similar film Aquarium (2009). As Bird, this film also benefited greatly from the restless, manic cinematography of longtime collaborator Robbie Ryan; a central performance from a newcomer who overflows with raw talent and a screen presence to burn; and a handsome, well-known actor who makes a bad male role model.

This time, the questionable father figure is more standard father bullshit than predatory, and Keough commits to leaning into the character’s ladish immaturity and rough edges. Bug is a bit of a crook, and his big get-rich-quick plan is to sell the hallucinogenic secretions of a toad he mail-ordered from Colorado. (He was told that amphibians “drool” when they listen to crappy pop songs; his friends suggest they put on “Murder on the Dance Floor.”) Salt burn the joke may not be intentional, but it’s still funny to hear Keough yell off-screen, “Hey, I like this song!” “) He and Rogowski, to whom Bird is less a surrogate father than another sensitive misfit — and is, in fact, on a quest to find his own long-lost father — help flesh out these men who gravitate toward Adams, disjointed and repressed pubescent. As for the young performer at the center of it all, we hope this is the start of a long and successful career for her.

There are other bits of plot swirling around Arnold’s vision of a kid growing up hard and fast in a teenage wasteland, from Bailey’s infatuation to join Hunter’s vigilante gang to her relationships with her mother (Jasmine Jobson) and the domestic abuser of a boyfriend. (James Nelson-Joyce). But mostly it’s about Bailey and his weird new friend, wandering the streets of Kent, sitting in graffiti-filled apartments, or interacting with real local residents throughout the city. For a long time, Bird trudges forward as yet another dirty kitchen sink drama, filled with lives of quiet desperation, muted dignity and – thanks to one of the many visual notes that Arnold throws in – the occasional passage of a cruise ship so close , but so very far. .

That is, until it deviates significantly from the standard of British storytelling Miserablism 101. There are dollops of magical realism sprinkled throughout, if you know to look for them. There are also suspicions about the true nature of this stranger, who seems both kind and borderline crazy. Let’s just say that when those suspicions are confirmed, they do so in the most extravagant, disruptive, elegant way possible, and you either go for that pivot or you don’t. Bird is perhaps the most controversial film of Andrea Arnold’s career, and we’re including the gloriously wild 2011 adaptation of Wuthering Heights. But like everything she’s done so far, it’s also unexpectedly rewarding — the kind of film that draws from an endless reservoir of empathy as much as it shocks you with its extremities.