By Peter Keough

In director Steve McQueen’s Blitz, chaos can be a scary but exciting adventure, as tragedy and trauma mingle with the magic of a fairy tale.

Blitz. Directed by Steve McQueen. At the Coolidge Corner Theatre, Kendall Square Cinema, West Newton Cinema, and Cinema Salem.

Elliott Heffernan and Saoirse Ronan in a scene from Steve McQueen’s Blitz.

As the conflicts now convulsing the world prove, children suffer the most in wartime. They also do so in movies, with nihilistic despair in Roberto Rossellini’s Germany Year Zero (1948), or with the dubious compensations of the childish imagination in René Clément’s Forbidden Games (1952). Fred Zinnemann’s The Search (1948) offers hope for restoration in a broken world. In some films, like John Boorman’s autobiographical Hope and Glory (1987), urban ruins offer opportunities for fun and games. Likewise in Steve McQueen’s Blitz, where chaos can be a scary but exciting adventure, as tragedy and trauma mingle with the magic of a fairy tale.

The title, as the text of the film’s preface reminds us, refers to the Nazi terror bombing of London from September 1940 to May 1941 during which over 40,000 civilians were killed. At times, it feels as if the entirety of this months-long campaign of carnage and chaos has been compressed into the 24-hour or so period of McQueen’s narrative.

The hero, nine-year-old mixed-race George (outstanding newcomer Elliott Heffernan), has been sent reluctantly by his single mother Rita (Saoirse Ronan) from their London home (along with a million or so other children in targeted areas) into the relative safety of the British countryside. But George has other ideas. Nearly breaking his mother’s heart, he refuses to say farewell at the station. Then, midway in the journey, he slips out a window and escapes from the train. As one character notes, he’s a plucky one, resourcefully jumping a freight car, eluding capture and, not without grief or peril, making his way back to the firestorm of London.

Meanwhile, intercut with George’s adventures, Rita tries to cope with his absence and his bitter renunciation of her at their parting. Her Rosie-the-Riveter pals at the munitions factory where she makes bombs (ominously resembling those seen dropping through the night sky from German aircraft) advise her to take advantage of her freedom, to have a good time picking up men in bars. This does little to placate her grief and guilt, nor do the air raid sirens that send her and her working class neighbors to seek for shelter in the subway stations, which have been inexplicably shut. McQueen pointedly observes that class and racial oppression, not to mention the callousness of bureaucrats and stuffed shirt officials, lurk beneath the stiff upper lip surface of British unity. Though understated, these social dangers are almost as great as — and not unrelated to — those posed by the Luftwaffe.

A flashback to Rita in happier days with her West Indian beau and George’s future father ends with an attack from racist thugs. As expected, it’s the Black man who gets unfairly arrested and, apparently, deported. Because of his parentage George endures routine name-calling and, sadly, seems to have internalized some of the prejudice. He will not acknowledge his racial heritage, though he is stalwart when defending himself against those who taunt him. That changes when he encounters Ife (Benjamin Clémentine), a fire warden who appears to be a rescuing knight offering to help him find his way home. After Ife delivers a scolding speech about equality to some nasty racists sharing a shelter with their multicultural fellow citizens, George tells him that he too, is indeed Black.

Elliott Heffernan and Saoirse Ronan in a scene from Steve McQueen’s Blitz.

Rousing though it may be, Ife’s homily registers as a bit programmatic, as do some of the other self-consciously spectacular set-pieces and cryptically recurring images in McQueen’s odyssey. Throughout his ordeal George takes on a variety of familiar heroic roles, starting out as a resourceful hero in the Robert Louis Stevenson mold, followed by a detour into Dickens territory when he is press-ganged into a Fagin-esque band of looters. The latter offers McQueen the opportunity to stage a macabre, surreal visit to a bombed-out night-club full of dead upper-class partiers. They end up as prey for the colorful band of ghoulish grotesques that have enlisted George.

That’s one way to put it to the powers-that-be: the implication that, perhaps, the Blitz will prove to be a great equalizer. It turns out that McQueen’s agenda is not so bloodthirsty or revolutionary. Evidently, he is more approving of Ife’s approach as well as the Christian-Marxism espoused by Mickey (Leigh Gill), the inspirational, eloquent, and kindly dwarf volunteer aiding victims of the bombing.

Along with musical moments reminiscent of Small Axe (2020), McQueen’s epic mini-series about West Indian culture in Britain, Blitz is a tour not just of a city and a nation under siege but of the director’s various cinematic, literary, and art references and inspirations. The result is a film that is at times dazzling, at others pedantic and contrived. The narrative’s emotional high point comes when George gazes in horror at the sudden death of a child that could just as well have been himself. London in 1940, and today in Gaza, Ukraine, Africa, and other international war zones — they all bear witness to a dreadful truth. It is always the children who pay the price.

Peter Keough writes about film and other topics and has contributed to numerous publications. He had been the film editor of the Boston Phoenix from 1989 to its demise in 2013 and has edited three books on film, most recently For Kids of All Ages: The National Society of Film Critics on Children’s Movies (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019).