Review: 'Scrapper' is a quietly intense story of a resourceful girl and her wayward dad, coming to grips with grief and learning to trust each other

Like the whip-smart pre-teen at its center, the British drama “Scrapper” makes magic out of limited resources — as writer-director Charlotte Regan, in a stunning feature debut, balances a little girl’s hopeful fantasies and harsh realities with tenderness and heart.

Newcomer Lola Campbell plays Georgie, who at 12 has her world largely figured out. She keeps her row house, in a lower-income part of Essex, neat and tidy. She partners with a neighbor boy, Ali (Alin Uzun), to steal bicycles and sell them to make spare cash. She gets the stoner clerk at the local mini-mart to record messages for her, which she uses to fool her school’s officials and social workers into thinking an adult lives with her. In fact, Georgie’s been living alone since the death of her mother (Laura Aikman) — who we see in flashbacks and video snippets.

Georgie’s precarious routine is interrupted with the arrival of Jason (Harris Dickinson, from “Triangle of Sadness” and “Where the Crawdads Sing”). Jason is Georgie’s father, though he’s been absent ever since she was born. Now, he’s grieving for his former love, same as Georgie, and wants to get to know his daughter, though she’s wary of his intentions.

What Regan depicts, in bold yet subtle strokes, is two people growing up in a hurry — one to the reality of life without her mother, the other to the parenthood he wasn’t ready to accept a dozen years earlier. The emotional beats are precise to these characters, but so intense that they can be felt like a punch to the gut. Regan also throws in clever moments of fantasy, like when Georgie and Ali imagine the conversations the spiders in the apartment are having. (The movie won the World Cinema Dramatic Grand Jury Prize at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.)

Regan’s captivating storytelling is made whole by the two lead performances. Dickinson has been growing as an actor for years (it’s only been six years since his movie debut, as an aimless teen in Eliza Hittman’s drama “Beach Rats”) and is effective here as the adult finally figuring things out. And Campbell is an amazing find, capturing that blend of childlike innocence and street savvy that the best kid actors possess. Together, they make “Scrapper” a thoroughly alive story of restored connection.

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‘Scrapper’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, September 8, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Not rated, but probably R for language and some mature situations. Running time: 84 minutes.