The film stays close to George as he makes his way closer to home in Stepney Green in the East End. Blitz is far less concerned with the aerial bombardment above than the festering prejudices and injustices on the ground. In the movie’s most Dickens-esque sequence, George is taken in, and held prisoner, by a Fagin-like criminal (Stephen Graham) whose band of thieves steal from the dead and plunder freshly bombed-out flats. There are chillingly ghostly sequences, most of all one set in the Café de Paris. One moment it’s a teaming, multiracial jazz club, the next — as captured in one sweeping, grotesque shot by Yorick Le Saux — it’s a bloody ruin.
There are moments of uplift, or at least temporary relief. One comes when Rita, who works in a munitions factory with a Rosie the Riveter headscarf, sings for a BBC radio program from the factory floor. Once Rita learns that George is lost, there’s an ill-fitting side plot of her feuding with an unsympathetic boss, arguing with those in charge of the evacuation and her attempting to find George with the help of a police officer (Harris Dickinson, in a role too vague to resonate).
Again and again we see, though, that going against a tide of indifference takes the conviction and courage of individuals. That includes the activist Mikey Davies (Leigh Gill), who makes a stirring speech in a shelter. And, most of all, it includes a Nigerian ARP warden Ife (Benjamin Clémentine), who George meets outside a store advertising coffee and sugar from Africa with caricatures of Black faces. Clémentine, the talented singer-songwriter, has a radiant presence that warms a fiercely unsentimental film. Ife imbues George with a pride and confidence with himself as a young Black man. For his part, the young Heffernan shows no strain in carrying the movie, his first.
Ultimately, that there is a war on in Blitz may not be its defining feature. The London under siege in McQueen’s film is as much at risk from injustice as it is German planes. For George, Rita and the others pushing back, resistance isn’t just wartime survival. It’s a way of life.