Review: Small Axe: Red, White and Blue (2020)

Steve McQueen’s Small Axe anthology of films often explore the personal circumstances and political tensions that lead a person to political action. In the case of Mangrove, oppression from the London Metropolitan Police radicalizes restaurant owner Frank Crichlow. Red, White and Blue takes the opposite tack as it follows a man who reacts to police oppression and state dysfunction by seeking to change the system from within and joining the very police force that brutalizes his father. It’s an arresting drama that showcases the complications of political action by forcing you to experience the intimate life of a man you may profoundly disagree with.

Red, White and Blue stars John Boyega as Leroy Logan, who is a real man who joined the Met in the early 1980s even after his father, Ken (Steven Toussaint), was randomly beaten by two officers for parking his lorry on the side of the road. Leroy is not blind to the injustices his family and friends suffer, but he wants to mend the relationship between the police and the West Indian community he comes from, not solidify battle lines. There’s inherent dramatic tension in every element of Leroy’s life. He doesn’t get along with his father, who Toussaint plays as a proud, disappointed man. Ken wanted Leroy and his other children to get the best education and “become better Englishmen than the English,” as Leroy scornfully reminds him during an argument, and yet Ken balks at Leroy’s desire to leave an academic career behind and join the force as a constable.

Leroy is encouraged in his actions by his sympathetic auntie, who tells him he’s too charismatic to be stuck behind a desk all day doing research; she believes that he needs to connect with others and make himself heard. There’s a great dramatic irony here as we see Leroy end up isolated regardless, thwarted in his attempts to reform the police from within, and at the same time made a pariah at home and at work. His colleagues taunt him behind his back and leave him racist notes on his locker. When he goes to apprehend an armed suspect, his fellow officers ignore his call for backup, resulting in him taking a beating while arresting the suspect. Steve McQueen often isolates Boyega in the frame; either putting him on the opposite side of others or leaving the frame empty of people save for him. It’s a conventional visual approach, but effective.

While there would be a temptation to lean into such a character’s naivete, Boyega doesn’t play Leroy as a pollyanna-ish good soldier. He’s a man struggling with rage as much as his father is and he thinks, perhaps foolishly, that he can channel that rage into a productive form and use it to bend the police force to his will. Boyega’s performance is exceptional, both in the moments where he has to bite his tongue and tell his superiors what they want to hear, and when he unleashes his fury on bigoted colleagues, cowing them in their boots with the force of his words. There’s an inherent contradiction to a character like Leroy Logan and Boyega makes the most of the meaty drama of the role.

None of the films of Small Axe leave the audience with easy lessons, but Red, White and Blue may be the most conflicted of the films. As the ending title cards make clear, the real Leroy Logan became a superintendent and founded the Black Police Association. He made real accomplishments within the force and relations between the police and the West Indian community improved because of him, even if only modestly. But McQueen doesn’t show the later successes of his career. He ends the film early in Leroy’s tenure as a police constable, when he’s at the height of his conflict with the force, the community, and himself. 

The result may feel like the story isn’t finished by the time the movie ends—you could certainly justify an entire miniseries on the life of Leroy Logan. But Red, White and Blue is not meant to be a definitive statement on the life of Leroy Logan; it’s simply a snapshot of a period in his life and its central dramatic tension. It also reflects the unified nature of the Small Axe works, that each film works as an individual unit, but is made greater as a whole. Red, White and Blue grows richer and more complex when viewed as a contrast to a film like Mangrove. 

Small Axe has been compared to Kieślowski’s Dekalog, most notably by critic Josh Larsen, but I think Kieślowski’s Three Colors Trilogy is the more fruitful comparison (the three titles coincidentally make up the composite title of this film: Blue, White, and Red). In Three Colors each film is not one part of a whole but working in simultaneous conversation with each other, exploring the complexities and contradictions of a community and a time period. Red, White and Blue does not overwrite Mangrove, nor does it complete it; they are two examinations of a similar tension borne out of similar circumstances; two shades of colour, if you will, taken from the same palette.

8 out of 10

Small Axe: Red, White and Blue (2020, UK/USA)

Directed by Steve McQueen; written by Steve McQueen and Courttia Newland; starring John Boyega, Steve Toussaint, Joy Richardson, Neil Maskell, Stephen Boxer, Calum Callaghan, Conor Lowson, Assad Zaman, Antonia Thomas.

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