Brother review – brilliantly acted Canadian coming-of-age drama

This critically feted and broodingly touching Canadian drama from writer-director Clement Virgo focuses on two siblings, Francis and Michael, brilliantly played by Aaron Pierre and Lamar Johnson. Yet despite the title and the poster that both foreground the two male leads, the film could equally have been called Mother (as opposed to mother!), with Marsha Stephanie Blake dominating the screen as the Jamaican-Canadian matriarch Ruth, struggling to hold and protect her sons. Indeed, all of Brother’s most powerfully affecting moments centre on Ruth’s love and loss, with her children the source of her joy and sadness.

We first meet Francis and Michael as teenagers at the foot of a gigantic power pylon, an electrical crackle buzzing in the bright rural air. The older, more adventurous Francis is encouraging his shy younger brother to climb this vertiginous structure. “Follow my every move,” he tells him, “think on every step,” assuring Michael that if he does so he will be safe. From here, the drama jumps forward 10 years, to the more washed-out environs of downtown Scarborough, Toronto, where Michael meets Aisha (Kiana Madeira) and takes her back to the apartment he still shares with his mother. A former sweetheart (flashbacks show Michael’s affections dating back 20 years), Aisha is dealing with recent bereavement, and has come back to the place she once called home. Francis is nowhere to be seen, although quite why is a mystery that the movie reveals only very gradually.

Adapted from a novel by David Chariandy, Brother flits back and forth in time, dipping in and out of the lives of its central characters, watching the family grow and fall apart in non-linear fashion. At times the dreamy, meditative visuals put me in mind of Barry Jenkins’s Oscar-winning Moonlight, another coming-of-age tale built around disparate timeframes and temporal lapses. There’s something quietly insistent about the way cinematographer Guy Godfree’s floating cameras are always pushing into or pulling out of the widescreen frame, as if directing our attention toward some piquant unseen detail, or discreetly stepping back to avoid intruding on the characters.

Scenes of Ruth leaving her young children at home while she goes out to work night shifts deftly establish the harsh reality of her single-mother circumstance – a reality explicitly clarified when Aisha later tells Michael that “our immigrant parents cleaned toilets and cared for other people’s children… all for us”. But despite the background noise of police brutality, gang violence and financial peril, it is the altogether more intimate elements of Brother that drive the drama.

When Ruth tells young Francis to “help your brother with his homework” and be sure not to leave the apartment, we know immediately that his wanderlust will take both boys straight out into the night, where Michael is almost run down by a passing car. Later, when Michael is bullied by local gang members, Francis comes to his rescue but tells his brother that it is up to him to present a more cocky, confident front; to “show the world you’re not a nobody”.

Of course, behind the bravado Francis has his own secrets, and Virgo does a great job of confounding our expectations of macho masculinity, finding tenderness, protectiveness and even neediness beneath the street-tough exterior. It seems relevant that Virgo’s directorial CV includes a couple of episodes of David Simon’s matchless TV series The Wire, the show in which characters such as Michael K Williams’s Omar Little helped to redefine the popular parameters of machismo.

While British actor Aaron Pierre perfectly embodies the shielding older brother (a scene in which he unblinkingly grips the wrong end of a knife cuts deep), Lamar Johnson’s face presents a trembling symphony of fear and wonder, as if the world is revealing itself to him frame by frame. Mediating between these two opposite poles, Marsha Stephanie Blake shifts from indomitable mother hen to broken baby bird with aplomb, capturing the boundless energy and bottomless tragedy of motherhood, in all its myriad forms.

A lush, melancholic score by Todor Kobakov rises and falls like the sea, while Nina Simone’s spine-tingling rendition of Jacques Brel’s Ne Me Quitte Pas is astutely deployed as the key that unlocks a tumbling montage of memories.

• In cinemas and on Curzon Home Cinema