Bullet Boy at 20: it’s relevant, yes, but it’s also cinema

Walking less than five minutes south of Clapton Overground station in Hackney, at an almost equidistant position between Upper and Lower Clapton Road, you come to The Clapton Hart pub. What was once known as Chimes, an infamous nightclub marred by frequent instances of violent crime, is now a large and extremely popular gastro pub with a sprawling garden, frequented in equal measure by young families and creative professionals, and where a local East London accent is an anomaly. 

Chimes was a prominent hub of what was known in the media as Britain’s ‘Murder Mile’, a stretch of road associated with a number of gun-related murders in the late 1990s and early 2000s, usually attributed to Black gangs in the area. It became a chief location for the Metropolitan Police’s ‘Operation Trident’, an anti-Black gun-crime initiative which served to animate the popular imagination and invoke widespread racial anxiety towards the area’s once dense Black community. 

It’s this combination of factors – Murder Mile as a location within Hackney, the allure of what is believed but unknown about Black masculine identity, and the sensationalist media reports on the crisis of Black gun crime in London – that provide the source material for Bullet Boy (2004).

Released in Britain 20 years ago, in April 2005, Saul Dibb’s film tells the story of Ricky (Ashley Walters), who, on returning home from a young offender’s institute, is immediately embroiled in gun conflict within Clapton. This theme of Black-on-Black gun crime gives the film its most dramatic moments. But what’s most distinctive about Bullet Boy’s circumscribed account of the lives of young Black men in London’s inner city is its neorealist aesthetic, and how this distinguishes Bullet Boy from the body of Black urban films and TV, including Rollin’ with the Nines (2006) and Life and Lyrics (2006), that emerged in the following years. 

In Bullet Boy, a now almost unrecognisable experience of a pre-gentrified Hackney is captured in a series of beautiful establishing shots, including images of Hackney Marshes which are devoid of the monolithic structures that have come to dominate the East London skyline across Stratford’s Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. Here, Dibb’s film offers a unique visual archive of the past, its open greenery, distressed physical landscapes and racially dense environments serving to emphasise the unrealised legacies of the later London 2012 Games. This regeneration would transform the area from a collection of abandoned industrial sites, brownfields and housing estates to a space of sporting, cultural and economic activity. But the development failed to fully include those living within the surrounding working-class communities of Newham, Hackney and Tower Hamlets.

Bullet Boy occupies a curious bridging position between film culture and Black social crises, arriving at a time when the UK film and television industry had been given a New Labour mandate for cultural inclusivity. As detailed in my recent book Black Boys: The Social Aesthetics of British Urban Film, Bullet Boy was one of the more notable productions to emerge from the UK Film Council’s New Cinema Fund. Given the industrial conditions of the 1990s and early 2000s, where Black British films and filmmakers had routinely experienced erasure and exclusion, Bullet Boy was an important intervention.

The idea of ‘relevance’ is frequently used to promote and critically assess older films during their recirculation, especially when they are seen to address immediate cultural, social or political moments. This term is commonly applied to Black British cinema, where discussions around revisiting historical Black British films, like Horace Ove’s Pressure (1975) or John Akomfrah’s Handsworth Songs (1986), often emphasise thematic ‘relevance’ as their specific Black cultural value.

While understandable in its intentions, the use of this word is also inherently reductive, and limits what can be identified and experienced in Black British film as meaningful for new audiences. It’s not always necessary to recirculate films from the past only to make sense of the present. For Black people, we are already confronted with an ever-expansive body of visual and narrative signifiers that remind us of the conditions of living while Black in Britain. 

Accepting Bullet Boy solely for its contemporary social relevance means accepting the media characterisation of the social context that informed its realism – namely the public discourse on the criminal Black masculine identity crisis, and the idea of ‘Black on Black’ gun crime as a phenomenon.

The 20th anniversary of its theatrical release is an opportunity to free Bullet Boy from the restrictive idea of the film as a repository for understanding Black youth crime, which is beyond the ambit of any single work. Rather, Bullet Boy’s continued relevance is in its more primary purpose as a highly accomplished and important work of cinema. The film’s sincere treatment of the impact of gun crime upon the Black family is made meaningful through its documentary aesthetics, which are complemented by richly nuanced performances from Walters, Clare Perkins and Luke Fraser. 

Bullet Boy’s themes are in no way insignificant. New generations of audiences over the last 20 years have, and will rightly continue, to find a familiarity in the film’s subject matter, storylines and representations, and in simply seeing Black British people on screen in real geographies and locations. Equally, Bullet Boy now sits within a much broader Black representational sphere where stories of fatal Black urbanity are no longer the sole form of filmic identification. Films such as The Last Tree (2019), Lovers Rock (2020), Pretty Red Dress (2022), Rye Lane (2023) and many others now offer a different key and imagination for Black British identity, crucially, as a cinematic experience. This gives Bullet Boy renewed significance as just one of what is now a significant body of Black British films (and Black representation in other films). 

What’s more, Bullet Boy allows new and returning audiences the opportunity to witness the nascent moments in the career of Ashley Walters as one of the UK’s most influential screen actors. Walters has since become a source of inspiration to new generations of Black British performers and figures across a range of genres and creative mediums, who reference Bullet Boy as the starting point in their appreciation of Walters’ work. Walters has played an essential role in the development of Black British film and television not just as text but as a distinctive, highly lucrative and globally acclaimed Black British 21st-century audiovisual culture, of which music, fashion, art and popular culture are all a part.

Twenty years after its release, Bullet Boy’s relevance shouldn’t be reduced to what it may articulate about Black youths and crime. It should be celebrated instead as a visual and contextual archive for all that has changed, and all that has been lost but is worthy of reflection and remembrance, appreciation and lamentation. Beyond its themes, Dibb’s film occupies a central position in the continuing contribution of Black British film.

Dr Clive Chijioke Nwonka is Associate Professor in Film, Culture and Society in the School of European Languages, Culture and Society within UCL’s Faculty of the Arts and Humanities, and a Faculty Associate of the UCL Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Racism and Racialisation. Prior to UCL, he was Lecturer in Film and Literature the Department English and Related Literature at the University of York and the London School of Economics and Political Science, where he was an LSE Fellow in Film Studies within the Department of Sociology. 

Nwonka’s scholarship broadly centres on race and the humanities. His research is focused on the study of Black film, culture and identity, with a particular focus on the images of Black urbanity and the modes through which Black identities are shaped by representations of social environments, architecture, social anxieties and the hegemony of neoliberalism within forms of Black popular culture. In addition, he has published extensively on racial inequality in the creative industries and ‘diversity’ policy frameworks that are equally born from broader political discourses on race, racism and cultural difference. Thus, Dr Nwonka’s research is interdisciplinary and spans across Film Studies, literature, Cultural Studies, Black Studies and Sociology.

He is the co-editor of the book Black Film/British Cinema II (2021), the author of the book Black Boys: The Social Aesthetics of British Urban Film (2023), which was longlisted for the 2024 Krazna Krausz Moving Image Book Award, the author/co-editor of the book Black Arsenal: Club, Culture and Identity (2024) and co-author of the forthcoming book Race and Racism in the Creative and Cultural Industries (2025).

His writing and research have featured regularly in The Guardian, The Observer, New York Times, BBC News, Sight and Sound, and has featured on BBC Radio 4, BBC Front Row, ITV News, CNN International, BBC Africa, BBC Sport and Sky Sports News. In addition, Nwonka has collaborated on research with The Barbican Centre, the British Film Institute, Tate Modern/Tate Britain, The Southbank Centre, The Royal Academy of Arts, ITV, the Danish Film Institute, The Labour Party, The Council of Europe and Arsenal Football Club.

A 20th anniversary screening of Bullet Boy followed by a Q&A with Ashley Walters and Clare Perkins takes place at BFI Southbank on 6 May.