Crime and punishment figures in John Crowley’s sophomore film. By JACOB POWELL.

BEGINNING in a fairly muted fashion, John Crowley’s second feature, Boy A, maintains its restraint throughout, and is the better for it. The film’s eponymous lead gained this moniker from the court case which saw him spend the whole of his adolescence behind bars. It is the label that the ever hungry media still use for him and seems about as apt a description as to who he might be as the new name, Jack Burridge, that he has adopted to start life over, or even his birth name, Eric Wilson, which represents the past the young man is attempting to leave behind.

Boy A opens with Jack (Andrew Garfield, Lions for Lambs, The Other Boleyn Girl) and his counsellor Terry (Peter Mullan, My Name Is Joe, Children of Men) meeting to discuss the details of his release from prison and return to the outside world – a world both longed for and full of potential menace. Andrew Garfield fits the role of the quiet, awkward lad, uncomfortable in his own skin, to a tee (once you can get the idea of a young Noel Gallagher out of your head!) whilst Terry exudes the same rugged empathy that Mullan instilled in the character of Joe Kavanagh for Ken Loach.

Based on a recent (2004) novel of the same name by Jonathan Trigell, Crowley’s film covers similar thematic ground to Nicole Kassell’s 2004 drama The Woodsman. Even the supporting characters share a sense of similarity: cf Katie Lyons as girlfriend Michelle in the former with Kyra Sedgwick’s role of Vicki and Shaun Evans as close friend Chris with Benjamin Bratt as the understanding brother-in-law in the latter. And though the narrative premises differ – sexual predator vs child killer – both explore the complexity surrounding the possibility of change and redemption for an individual and the society that they have injured.

One big difference is that of context. Boy A’s story is one that rings true in an English context; bringing to mind the Bulger case from 1993 where two 10-year-old boys were convicted of abducting and murdering 2-year-old James Bulger, and also the granting of secret identity to Mary Bell, convicted of killing two boys when she was only 11 years of age. This is a story that reverberates in the English psyche. Running parallel to the narrative of Jack struggling to re-enter the world at large as a new person is the story of his life leading up to the violent murder perpetrated by he (as Eric) and his disturbed young friend Philip over 10 years earlier.

Though the director occasionally falls into the trap of over-exposition, when the audience might have been better left draw their own conclusions, the film avoids coming off as trite. Well thought out and sensitively played, Boy A is a meditation on the formation of identity which does a nice job of opening up some dark, uneasy issues that deserve to be thought about.