The radical British filmmaker Ken Loach doesn't make movies so much as grenades. They explode with realism and bitterness and almost always leave you shaken. That is certainly true of his new film, "Ladybird, Ladybird," even if it's not quite on a level with his last two films, "Riff-Raff" and "Raining Stones."
Loach has a superb gift beyond the fury that drives him. He's able to take real people -- that is, nonprofessional actors -- and somehow hypnotize them into giving unbearably compelling and believable performances. In this case, the two leads -- Crissy Rock and Vladimir Vega -- are, respectively, a stand-up comedian and a band musician. But they become so totally their characters that "Ladybird, Ladybird" becomes one of those peculiar films that supersedes any identity as artifice and comes to seem achingly real.
The issue is real enough. It is also harrowing enough. It's about the terrible contagion of child abuse and how the abused becomes the abuser, passing the curse along. Maggie (Rock) is a welfare mother living in the blighted English slums. Abused as a child, she's abused as an adult (by a brutal husband; the scenes of the beatings are almost unwatchable). Eventually abandoned, she wants desperately to be a good mother, but the burdens of the past are difficult to escape. One night she locks her kids up and goes to the pub down the street for a night ......C karaoke; there's a fire and her oldest son is hideously burned. Eventually, the British Social Services declare her an unfit mother and remove all four children to foster care.
She's devastated. At the same time, she's begun an affair with the best man she'll ever meet, a gentle, decent Paraguayan refugee named Jorge (Vega, who is Chilean). They, too, have a child. Again, Social Services claims the baby; then it happens again.
"Ladybird, Ladybird" is full of powerful, disturbing imagery. It offers a portrait of a woman victimized by a powerful and unfeeling bureaucracy, one that will literally rip a newborn out of the arms of its parents. But it's not didactic. The point can be made that Maggie is a terrible mother -- she has no visible means of support, she flies into insane rages, and until she meets Jorge she has a tendency to chose violent idiots as her mates.
In the end, its signal accomplishment -- other than its absorbing story line -- is that it takes the cliche and turns it into a complete human being. And of course where complete human beings are involved, no easy answers can be found.
"Ladybird, Ladybird"
Starring Crissy Rock and Vladimir Vega
Directed by Ken Loach
Released by Goldwyn
Unrated (violence, extreme profanity)
***