The Apple TV+ dramatic feature centers on a young boy and his mother trying to find their way back to one other amid the bombing of the city.

Intricately detailed yet broad in its brushwork, Steve McQueen’s Blitz offers a densely packed vision of London at war in 1940, as seen through the eyes of a 9-year-old boy (discovery Elliott Heffernan), trying to make it home to his single mother, Rita (Saoirse Ronan). Aptly enough, given the city where it’s set, the film is positively Dickensian in its tendency to heap misfortune on top of melodrama, though it offers relatively little of the sort of light comic relief that Charles Dickens also excelled at. But no one could quarrel with its timely message about how much ordinary folks suffer when bombs fall on civilian targets.

It might all have worked better had it just loosened its waistband, giving its story and characters more room to breathe. The fact that in-demand actor Harris Dickinson (Triangle of Sadness, soon to be seen in Babygirl), barely does more here than make calf eyes at Ronan from the sidelines suggests content jetsam may have been thrown overboard somewhere along the way.

From an auteurist point of view, the picture fits snugly into McQueen’s filmography. There’s an obvious overlap with the concerns and themes explored in his most recent projects — specifically the made-for-TV film series Small Axe, with its focus on the Black experience in Britain, and the documentary feature Occupied City, which paired voiceover narration describing significant events at specific addresses around Amsterdam during WWII with contemporary footage of those same sites in the present day.

In interviews prior to Blitz’s premiere at the BFI London Film Festival, McQueen has explained that it was somewhat accidental that it and Occupied City ended up coming out back-to-back. But the two certainly speak to one another from across the North Sea. Both illustrate the sufferings of capital city dwellers at the hands of the Nazis, and show that just as the war brings out some people’s best, it can draw out their worst instincts as well.

Meanwhile, McQueen has mentioned that the choice to anchor the narrative around young biracial boy was inspired by a photograph he found while researching Small Axe, of a Black child in a too-big coat and enigmatically stoic expression being evacuated during the war. Heffernan, whom McQueen and casting director Nina Gold found during an extensive casting call for the lead role of George, is a ringer for the boy. While the young star had only acted in school plays before, he takes to the spotlight well against his more experienced co-stars, with his still presence and steady, unabashed gaze.

Though it’s not quite said, it’s clear George is also rightly anxious about meeting people beyond the metropolis who might not be used to seeing people of color. Lo and behold, not long after he boards a train with hundreds of children, he’s bullied by others. Seeing the way this is going to go, George makes the fateful decision to jump off the slow-moving steam train and head back to London.

And so George’s odyssey begins. His homeward bound journey is as fraught with mishaps, fatal accidents and unexpected moments of kindness as the one Odysseus himself took, only it doesn’t take 10 years. George hops another train and meets three brothers his age who had the same idea about turning around and heading straight back home. They share an exhilarating ride on the roof after George accepts a dare, which gives composer Hans Zimmer and his orchestra a chance to let rip with a percussive, thrumming score. Once he makes it back to the outskirts of the Smoke, he must find his way back to Stepney Green in the East End of town, a trip many a Londoner would be stumped to work out today were it not for the invention of Google Maps.

Over the course of several days, a lot happens. He makes friends with Ife (musician Benjamin Clementine), a Nigerian immigrant who is working as a blackout warden. Ife’s nobility and kindness make him exactly the kind of role model of Black masculinity that George has been missing in his life, having never known the Caribbean father, Marcus (CJ Beckford, seen only in a flashback), who was unjustly deported before George was born.