Blockhead review: BritLit bad boy meets his builder-golem

Writer-director Matt Harlock takes a red pencil to the myth of the bad-boy novelist in Blockhead, a British indie thriller about a one-book wonder whose new muse arrives in overalls. The film stars Danny Horn as Will Mercer, a BritLit posterboy much admired for his debut novel A Random Act and now mired in indecision over the follow-up.

The stakes are personal and professional. According to the Guardian's review, that stalled second book threatens to cost Will his relationships, his representation and his reputation alike. So he retreats to a friend's garret to write. It doesn't go well.

Then the builder knocks. Enter Mikey, played by Joe Sims: a bullet-headed, charismatic hulk who, in the reviewer's memorable phrase, is "a very handy golem in overalls" — a creature who merits and invites closer literary study. Mikey is unarguably an arresting character. He is also a worry, given the path he leads our man down.

What does the film owe to Stevenson and Fincher?

Plenty, and Harlock knows it. The Guardian's critic situates Blockhead in the tradition of Robert Louis Stevenson wrestling his shadow self while writing Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. The present-day equivalent of that Victorian split is Will Mercer, a writer whose ego and insecurity collide once Mikey gives him permission to misbehave.

The reviewer is blunter about the second template: "No prizes, then, for guessing which David Fincher film provides the template here." The linked answer is Fight Club. Will types to a soundtrack of his own best reviews — "The world needs to hear your story" — and an emboldened Will soon explores grislier avenues, including home invasion and murder. His increasingly unhinged rants to creative-writing students attract a rapt protege along the way.

Is Harlock mocking the literary bad boy?

Yes, and with some precision. The film evokes a publishing world that pushes books with unequivocally positive pull quotes like "confrontational" and "dangerous". Harlock is taking a red pencil to hackneyed notions of bad-boy writers. There is, he posits, only so much muscle one can wield while hunched over a laptop.

That is the joke at the film's centre. The novelist wants to be dangerous; the actual dangerous man is fixing the wall. Mikey embodies the machismo Will can only type about, and the film's comic-thriller engine runs on the gap between the two.

One clarification for the curious: the title has nothing to do with Ian Dury. This is a brisk, effective British indie thriller about ego, insecurity and the grisly road a writer takes when his inner monster gets a literal body.

The review's verdict suggests Blockhead works as both genre exercise and literary satire. For a film about the perils of second novels, that's a fitting outcome: the debut-purge, done with a body count.