I, Daniel Blake Review: One Man vs. the System in Inspiring Social-Realist Drama

Working stiffs getting screwed by the system that theme has always cut deep with veteran British filmmaker Ken Loach. An old-school social realist, the 80-year-old filmmakers creative output has always spoke up for the exploited lower classes, from a BBC play about the homeless (1966s Cathy Come Home) to a treatise on Irish guerilla fighters (2006s The Wind That Shakes the Barley).

I, Daniel Blake, a new Loach landmark which won the Palme dOr at the Cannes Film Festival last year, sums up everything that has kept he muckraking motor running for decades. The title character, played by comic actor Dave Johns in a performance of ingrained decency and riveting restraint, is a 59-year-old carpenter whos just buried his wife and suffered a heart attack. Blakes illness prevents him on doctors orders from returning to work, which means he cant pay the rent on his low-cost, Newcastle housing unit without aid from the welfare system. When that help is denied, our everyman must go through the appeal process.

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The director and his longtime screenwriter Paul Laverty handle the byzantine roadblocks set up to prevent Daniel from getting his due with bruising humor and barely concealed rage. (Clearly, their concerns stretch to our own borders as well as Great Britains.) Loach is nothing if not a humanist, one who sees what should unite us all in times of duress, and this is arguably one of his best and most accessible movies to date.

The computer-ignorant Blake, floundering in a bureaucracy thats digital by default, finds a sense of family in another victim of the system. Shes Katie (Hayley Squires), a single mother of two forced out of her London flat and into selling herself to make ends meet. Loach, understandably, stacks the deck in favor of these people society has labeled losers, but Johns and Squires play them with indelible simplicity and feeling. When Daniel risks arrest by scrawling his plight on the side of an official building, he rouses cheers from passersby. Its hard not to cheer along.