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The weather being what it is in Yorkshire, a sunroof is not a top priority for most car buyers in that English county — but the tired hatchback driven by young slacker Frankie (Samuel Bottomley) has one. That’s the first
of a few improbabilities in “The State of Us,” an occasionally hokey but winningly sweet-natured buddy comedy from British newcomer Ollie Gardner and Jake Harvey, and it’s a forgivable one: How else, at a key emotional juncture, will his ailing best friend Taylor (Callum Scott Howells) stand up in the car to freely embrace the cold night with arms outstretched? It’s a shameless cliché of an image, recycled from the likes of “The Perks of Being a Wallflower” and TV’s “Euphoria,” but the film gets away with the steal, in large part because Frankie and Taylor are, at least for a moment, chasing the life they’ve seen in slicker American youth movies.
The life they actually live, meanwhile, mixes grainily downbeat British social realism of the Paul Laverty-scripted Ken Loach school with flashes of more Hollywoodized sentimentality and narrative contrivance — as Taylor, a terminally cancer-stricken young man living in a hospice, is broken out of his glum surroundings by Frankie, his irresponsible bestie, cuing one wild night of boyish misbehavior and more mature emotional reckonings.
The result isn’t always convincing, but it’s far more consistently likable, thanks in large part to lively performances by Howells (TV’s “It’s a Sin”) and especially Bottomley (“How to Have Sex”), who maintain a key sense of hard-times kinship and tension in the bond at the film’s center. Premiering in the main competition at Edinburgh, “The State of Us” should continue to please crowds at smaller festivals; theatrical prospects are modest, but streaming and broadcast potential is strong.
A brief prologue outlines the childhood damage still borne by boisterous ne’er-do-well Frankie, who lost his mother at an early age, and whose incapable father left him to be raised in Taylor’s more stable household; already best buds, the boys wound up closer to brothers. When we cut to the present day, however, it’s clear something unspecified has gone awry in this chosen-family setup. The friends haven’t seen each other in some time, though Frankie spends many an evening parked outside the hospice in his car, summoning the gumption to visit. When he does, it’s after hours: Breaking into the building via an elderly patient’s window, he ropes a bewildered Taylor into his late-night escape plan without so much as a friendly catch-up.
His rashness may be ill-advised, but it does abet the film’s fleet pacing: Cut to a brisk 90 minutes by ace editor Chris Gill (“Kneecap,” “28 Days Later”) and Abi Wright, “The State of Us” ably swings between tragedy and farce in the course of its overnight structure, even making more-or-less sense of an awkwardly shoehorned romantic subplot between Taylor and enigmatic cool girl Rosie (Safia Oakley-Green, the gifted star of indie horror “Out of Darkness,” making the most of a stock role), whom he meets at the scuzzy house party Frankie insists on crashing, and with whom he has more in common than meets the eye.
The extended party setpiece allows for some amusing scatological hijinks, but the film is most moving and enjoyable when simply focused on its two leads, whether talking things out in the car or on the country hill of sundry childhood memories. (“The Outrun” DP Yunus Roy Imer keeps the shooting intimate and unfussy, but the rolling beauty of the Yorkshire landscape offers some valuable background support.) Howells, gifted the more openly sympathetic role, puts his naturally anxious brows and forlorn demeanor to good use as Taylor, without making him too much of a victim; there are glimpses here of the buoyant, nurturing partner that he used to be in the friendship.
But it’s Bottomley who impresses most here, at every turn lining Frankie’s obnoxious, juvenile antics with soulful self-doubt, and terror of yet more grief crashing his still-young life. As “The State of Us” unsubtly but effectively turns on the waterworks, it’s him, as much as his dying friend, we find ourselves dabbing our eyes for. He, too, has earned some time out of the sunroof.
