Beasts Of No Nation

"Beasts of No Nation" may be best remembered for not just being a compelling film (which it is), but for its unusual distribution method. For the first time Netflix will be streaming a first-run movie on the same day it opens in theaters, which led to four major theater chains balking at the idea of booking it. (It opens largely at theaters run by the Landmark chain on Friday.)

Whether this mitigates its success won't be immediately known; though the film -- Cary Joji Fukunaga's fiercely brutal account of a young boy's abrupt coming-of-age in an unnamed, war-torn African nation -- is already a hard-sell. How else can you describe a movie in which its central character -- a boy named Agu -- snorts heroin between committing heinous war crimes with a motley crew of marauding rebels?

Adapted by Fukunaga from the 2005 novel by Nigerian-American author Uzodinma Iweala, "Beasts of No Nation" centers on nine-year old Agu who lives with his family in a UN-protected region of a nation in turmoil. On one side are the rebels, on the other is the government; with Agu, his family and their fellow villagers precariously caught in the middle. When rebels attack, Agu's father and brothers are killed. He escapes to the brush where he's caught by a rag-tag group of rebels under the leadership the Commandant (a ferocious Idis Elba). Instead of having Agu killed, the Commandant takes a liking to him and adds him to his army of men and boys.

Within weeks Agu participates in his first gory killing. That sequence, in which Agu wields a machete, at first reluctantly, then with vicious fury, on a desperate engineering student pleading for his life, is harrowing. (Its only contemporary equivalent is those hideous ISIS beheading videos.) That Fukunaga doesn't flinch in presenting it has led some to dismiss the film for being unwatchable; yet it is essential in understanding the mania that Agu is engulfed in and becomes part of.

How he journeys from a sweet, wisecracking kid to a hollowed boy soldier is the trajectory of this picaresque story that Fukunaga presents with surprising emotional detachment. Agu provides a running commentary to his story that oddly poetic. (His words, I believe, are lifted directly from the novel.) In this sense "Beasts" resembles "Badlands," Terrence Malick's fictionalized account of a young girl's involvement with a serial killer in the 1950s in which Sissy Spacek offered a dreamy narration often at odds with her reality.

Like Malick, Fukunaga finds lyricism in the horrific stream of events that Abu is subjected to and participates in. That the director acted as his own director of photography, brings an unusual high level of control to his vision. Still his adaptation suffers from the episodic nature of the story, which may lead some to turn it out as it moves towards its conclusion; yet it is nuanced account of the chaos and inhumanity of war that resembles Jerzy Kosinski's equally horrific and similarly themed World War II novel "The Painted Bird" in its final impact.

As the charismatic Commandant, Elba makes for an ambivalent, larger than life presence. He is a beast, a sociopath who forces his young minions to not only kill, but enjoy it; but he fancies himself as a keen military leader with ambitions of greater glory, which leads to his downfall. That he exudes a curious charm that is not lost on the audience. There's something almost comic about him, yet he's no cardboard villain. The beauty of Elba's performance is how he gives this loathsome character a near Shakespearean dimension, so much so that he commands the film just as much as he commands his army.

The young actor Abraham Attah conveys Abu's transformation with complex, often contradictory emotions. There are moments when his fearfulness is palpable, at other times, he's coolly detached -- a camera-like presence recording a terrifying series of events in which he participates. Early on the Commandant warns his second in command not to be fooled by the innocence of youth. "A boy is a dangerous thing," he tells him. Over the remaining 90 minutes his words ring alarmingly true. "Beasts of No Nation" is not for the faint-hearted, but those willing to experience it will no doubt be haunted for some time afterward this account of a young boy's dispiriting coming of age.