Rocks is a heartfelt depiction of human behaviour through a teenager’s eyes – DLIT

it clearly owes a debt to the movies of the French New age, particularly Francois Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959). All this gives Rocks an authenticity and edge over American coming-of-age movies. Rocks catches a formative week in the life of the titular Rocks (Bukky Bakray)as she tries to handle her mother leaving, without caution, while protecting her younger sibling Emmanuel (D’angelou Osei Kissiedu)and dealing with all the other adversities that feature being a teenager. Very first time actor Bakray is extraordinary as the film’s lead character, offering her character’s vulnerability and the exterior that Rocks utilises in order to

handle her life changing situation. Director Sarah Gavron and partners remarkably balance the joy that youth brings with the bleak and awful circumstance Rocks finds herself in. It attains this by providing

characters that feel genuine; the cliques and conversations in school are authentic, the characters that inhabit the screen talk like real teens. Their houses feel resided in and even the tiniest of dramas are handled seriously. All these aspects develop a world that is varied, lively and real. Time actor Bakray is remarkable as the film’s lead character A detracting aspect however, is the relentless pull of war between developing an observational-style plotless movie and concurrently desiring to craft a story with regularplot beats. The film then does neither, as although Rocks is rather plot-light, it still falls under regular plot-trappings such as the argument and subsequent separation of the best friends, and the arrival of a brand-new lady at school. This is maybe where the film needs a particular director’s vision, to create a more nuanced and a little less muddled narrative. The movie conquers this through its genuine representation of human behaviour through a teen’s eyes. The movie skyrockets the highest when it zones in on Rocks’requirement to