Review: “Scrapper”

“It takes a village to raise a child.”

This sentence that appears across a black screen disappears within an instant, scratched out by yellow, crayon-like markings, a new sentence scrawled beneath it in clumsy handwriting: “I can raise myself thanks.” This playful intro kicks both the style and tone of Scrapper into motion. Writer and director Charlotte Reagan’s warm-hearted debut feature (which had its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, where it was awarded the Grand Jury Prize in the World Cinema Dramatic Competition) follows Georgie (Lola Campbell), a spunky 12-year-old eking out her own existence in the working-class London suburb where she resides. Georgie’s mother Vicky recently passed away after a long illness, and the community believes that Georgie is now residing with an uncle. But Georgie is actually living in the flat she shared with her mom on her own. Endlessly resourceful, she doesn’t attend school, spending her time pilfering bikes off the street with her best friend and neighbor Ali (Alin Unzun) and selling them as a source of income, and convincing a local shop owner to record messages that she uses to trick social services into believing that her uncle is around when they call.

It’s a living, and it’s one that Georgie—who Scrapper’s opening day-in-the-life scenes fast establishes as someone quick on her feet, accomplished in marrying her childish charm to her adult sensibilities to finagle her way in and out of tricky situations— is clearly adept at. That is, until she’s alone, and the act of scrolling through old videos of her and her mom on her phone unleashes the waves of grief that she’s kept pent-up inside her, brushing it off every time someone asks her how she’s holding up. Georgie obviously can’t keep up this charade forever— Ali’s mom especially seems on to her in her reactions to Georgie’s evasive response to her wanting to meet her uncle— but her life as she knows it comes screeching to a halt when one day when a new face literally tumbles over the fence in her yard: that of Jason (Harris Dickinson), the father who hasn’t been present in Georgie’s life since she was born. And it soon becomes obvious why: as quickly as Georgie had to mature, Jason never really grew up, and the prospect of having a child at such a young age prompted him to flee. Initially uninterested in this intrusion and in Jason’s fumbling efforts to become a new parental figure to her, Georgie gradually warms up to him, as the pair stumble their way toward becoming a family; Jason learning to take responsibility, and Georgie realizing that it’s okay to just be a kid.

If there are two words that best sum up what makes Scrapper such a rousing, crowd-pleasing success, it’s these: Lola Campbell. In her first movie role, Campbell is more than merely spirited; she comfortably inhabits the role of a young person wrestling with an inner turmoil that she isn’t entirely certain how to process. She misses her mother, but she doesn’t want the adults in her community to perceive that as a weakness. She finds a kindred spirit in her father, but as much as she begins to enjoy his company, she still resents his absence up to now. Dickinson (who previously worked with Reagan on her 2019 short Oats & Barley and who audiences most recently saw playing a vapid model in last year’s Triangle of Sadness) perfectly matches Campbell’s energy. The pair’s chemistry is perhaps not on better display than in a scene later in the film in which, following an argument, Jacob needles Georgie into making up a story about a couple they see across the park, their investment in their role-playing growing in enthusiasm until the couple shouts out that they can hear them.

Reagan’s voice is immediately evident in Scrapper, not only in her well-sketched characters and their lived-in environments that are drawn from her own upbringing, but also the energetic technical flourishes she places throughout the film. These include such charming moments as making the spiders in Ali’s home talk (they all have their own names and agendas), or having figures in the community— social services, teachers, shop owners, other kids—comment documentary-style on what’s going on with Georgie and her life. These quirks are zany and amusing, but they work best at the start of the film, when we’re just getting to know Georgie, endearing us to her and her world immediately. As the narrative progresses, they somewhat undermine the burgeoning tenderness between Georgie and Jacob, an aspect of the story that could benefit from a more leisurely pace and less kinetic, edgy editing. In the long run, however, that isn’t much of a detriment to Scrapper’s effectiveness as a pleasant and moving father/daughter story. Whatever familiar terrain Scrapper traverses, Reagan compensates for with it with loads of humor and heart.

Scrapper opens in select theaters in New York and Los Angeles on August 25 and expands to more markets in the following weeks; click here for theaters and release dates. Runtime: 84 minutes.