'Steve' review: Netflix movie shows off Cillian Murphy's brilliance

WHAT IT'S ABOUT Oscar winner Cillian Murphy ("Oppenheimer") stars as the title character in "Steve." He's the head of Stanton Wood, a reform school for teenage boys in Britain. Set in 1996, the movie follows one day in the life of the school, as a TV news crew visits for a segment and the institution faces a crisis.

Key characters include Steve's deputy Amanda (Tracey Ullman), the school therapist Jenny (Emily Watson), and the boys that remain at the struggling Stanton Wood, including Shy (Jay Lycurgo), Riley (Joshua J. Parker), Tarone (Tut Nyuot) and others.

The picture is an adaptation by screenwriter Max Porter of his 2023 novel "Shy," and it's directed by Tim Mielants (who worked with Murphy and Watson on last year's "Small Things Like These").

MY SAY These boys have been left behind by their families and forgotten by society, and they are prone to bouts of serious anger and violence. So the movie can be a challenging watch as the story lurches from one crisis to the next for Steve and his staff. It's chaotic and it's tumultuous and it's unsettling.

But it's also honest.

Steve knows he's fighting a losing battle in the struggle to set these students on the right path and to keep the school functioning in a difficult economic climate. His own demons, including a struggle with addiction, lurk just outside the frame.

Nonetheless, he's determined and devoted, and the best scenes are the one-on-one moments between the teacher and the students as he coaxes them away from self-destructiveness and maybe, just maybe, toward something better.

These relationships form the center of the movie. Mielants shows us their development naturalistically, through moments that depend on subtle, heartfelt connections.

At other points, things go pretty haywire, including the filmmaker's overreliance on crooked camera angles, melodramatic close-ups and other unnecessary flourishes. There's almost too much mayhem for a single 90-minute-plus movie to handle. 

But Murphy is so effortlessly good at this, so charismatic and so adept at conveying empathy on-screen. He creates a whole emotional universe in a scene where he simply sits and talks with a student in the student's room, addressing his fears and concerns, calming him down and coaxing him back to class. 

His co-stars are every bit as game. Shy has one of the most devastating phone conversations imaginable with his mother and Lycurgo ("Titans") makes you feel every bit of his anguish. Ullman's Amanda is fiercely devoted to Steve, the students and the entire enterprise; her grief is made palpable and real as it all threatens to come crashing down.

Most importantly, the movie approaches the stories of these people and their challenging mission with a big, open heart, with the compassion necessary to see the value in the teens' lives instead of simply sweeping them away. There's no lost cause, the movie says. That's a fine message for the moment.

BOTTOM LINE Yet another reminder of why Murphy is one of the great actors working today.