Few movies were more freighted with expectation than Isaac Julien’s “Young Soul Rebels” — a politically minded musical drama populated by “soul boys,” punks, and skinheads, financed by the British Film Institute and directed by a 30-something Black gay film artist.
A double time-capsule, made in 1991 but set in 1977, the year of the Sex Pistols and Queen Elizabeth II’s Silver Jubilee, a newly restored print of the film, Julien’s first feature, is opening Oct. 20 at IFC Center.
The eponymous rebels are teenage best friends, Chris (Valentine Nonyela) and Caz (Mo Sesay), operating a pirate radio station, the Soul Patrol, that privileges funk over punk. Both have issues with the larger community. Chris is macho and gay. Caz is straight, metrosexual and the son of a white mother, played by Frances Barber. The co-star of Stephen Frears and Hanif Kureishi’s multi-culti “Sammy and Rosie Get Laid,” Barber was a rare veteran in a cast of neophytes.
Julien first attracted attention with his poetic essay “Looking for Langston,” a meditation on the Harlem Renaissance that outed the writer Langston Hughes and incurred the wrath of Hughes’s estate. “Young Soul Rebels” is more mainstream, less suggestive of the raw punk movies made in the late 1970s than the power pop films — “Something Wild” or “Desperately Seeking Susan” — that followed, as well as Hollywood’s 1990 tribute to pirate radio, “Pump Up the Volume.”
The kids quarrel, go clubbing — their preferred dive seems open to punk, disco, and soul — and find romance. Caz woos Tracy, a glamorous production assistant (the future star Sophie Okonedo). Chris is courted by a dimwitted anarchist punk (Jason Durr). Complications include racist cops, the patriotic frenzy of the Jubilee and, opening the movie, a friend’s murder.
“The moments when the film tries to build suspense are clankingly overdone,” Stephen Holden wrote in a generally sympathetic New York Times review, adding that “Young Soul Rebels” was best when exposing “the schisms in London society in scenes of the local street life, where tensions are often on the verge of erupting into violence.” Still, for all the shots of a cardboard cutout of an inanely waving Queen Elizabeth, the movie pulls a few punches, the nastiness of the far-right National Front, for one, seems somewhat mitigated.
“Young Soul Rebels” had its premiere at the 1991 Cannes Film Festival, where its queer-positive attitude and nuanced treatment of racial difference were overshadowed by three forceful Hollywood movies by Black filmmakers: “Jungle Fever,” “Boyz N the Hood” and “A Rage in Harlem.” As reported from Cannes, Julien criticized “Jungle Fever” and “Boyz” as sexist and homophobic and took particular issue with “Jungle Fever” for what he characterized as its negative view of interracial relationships. By contrast, Julien’s vision of the United Kingdom intimated the idyllic, inclusive United Colors of Benetton. Rather than the “no future” nihilism of 1977, “Young Soul Rebels” reflects the promise that came with the archconservative Margaret Thatcher’s political demise.
If hampered by its script, “Young Soul Rebels” is helped by an essential good cheer and a percolating soundtrack segueing from Funkadelic to the Blackbyrds to Poly Styrene. Indeed, this may be the most upbeat movie ever to open with a sex murder and end with a fascist riot — prelude to a curtain call that has the couples sorted out and everyone dancing.
Young Soul Rebels
Opens Oct. 20, IFC Center Manhattan, ifccenter.com.
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