This hour-long drama is centered on 12-year-old West Indian boy Kingsley Smith who lives in London in the 1970s, played by Kenyah Sandy with a bright-eyed enthusiasm dulled by soul-crushing experience before gradually re-emerging once he finds a supportive environment.

The original script by director Steve McQueen and Alastair Siddons plays like a YA adaptation, in the best possible way.

Kingsley is introduced staring up in wonder at the Andromeda Galaxy during a school science museum excursion as an American narrator drones on about the universe. An abrupt cut from that glittery sky to his home life reveals a far more constricted world.

His mother Agnes (Sharlene Whyte) returns from her night shift as a nurse with barely enough time to fix the family breakfast before setting out on her day job as a cleaner. The hours of his silent father Esmond (Daniel Francis), a laborer on the London Underground, make him a fleeting presence in the home. Kingsley has a scrappy but loving relationship with his older sister Stephanie (Tamara Lawrance), a smart teenager focused on getting into a design college and building a career in fashion. Her skirt lengths are an issue with her religious mother. Kingsley wants to be an astronaut, but also to play soccer for Tottenham.

Kingsley’s best friends at school are respectively white and South Asian, suggesting that the multicultural mix is smoother in that age group than in broader London society. But his teachers show no patience with his dyslexia. When he’s slow to respond after being called on in class during a reading lesson, a teacher calls him a “blockhead.” A minor disruption during band practice gets him ejected from class and soon Mrs. Smith is being summoned to the office of the headmaster (Adrian Rawlins) to discuss Kingsley’s problems.

The results of an independently monitored IQ test apparently have shown that Kingsley scored well below average and the headmaster spins his compulsory transfer to a “special school” as a unique opportunity. Agnes is too preoccupied by work and angered by her son’s disciplinary issues to object, so Kingsley is separated from his friends and bussed off to an institution tucked away in the outer suburbs, where learning is not a priority.

The key point of McQueen’s film is the shocking revelation that the Inner London Education Authority had a policy of targeting West Indian children through a cultural bias in IQ tests. Essentially, the kids were being written off without a chance in life virtually before they had even gotten started.(SD-Agencies)