An obscure little indie film found via trawling through Netflix, the main point of interest of King Jack is that it features an earlier starring role from Charlie Plummer, excellent in the film Lean on Pete.
An American working-class coming-of-age Ken Loach is the best way to describe this authentic but at times grim story. Jack (Plummer) is a lost soul drifting through school and adolescence, boredom and poverty part of the everyday. Something of an outsider among his peers, there’s a pre-film history to the narrative as Jack is the target of some viscious bullying. Things come to a head when his nine-year old cousin, Ben, arrives for the weekend.
King Jack is a seemingly wisp of a film, just 76 minutes long and taking place over a couple of days. Yet as characters dip in and out – whether it’s Jack’s put-upon single mom, his older brother Tom or the other kids – an even, fly-on-the-wall pace unfolds. In guiding the film, debut writer-director Felix Thompson looks to his cast (and particularly Plummer and Cory Nichols as cousin Ben) to evolve the naturalsm of the film’s coming-of-age narrative.
Rating: 64%
Director: Felix Thompson
Writer: Felix Thompson
Main cast: Charlie Plummer (Lean on Pete, All the Money in the World), Cory Nichols (Sign of the Times, TV’s Nurse Jackie), Christian Madsen (Mr Church, Divergent)
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