Mike Leigh Meets the Cure: The Three-Chord Nostalgia of Career Girls

Twitchiness is the operative metaphor here: the Cure’s early output—spiky, angsty postpunk, vacillating between dark antisocial posing and excitable riffing—is a synecdoche for the behavioral tics of youth. In their first meeting, Annie worries at her rampant dermatitis, and stares down or holds her head atilt, seemingly physically unable to raise her eyes to meet Hannah’s. Hannah pulls faces, throws eyebrows, and tells private jokes in a voice that’s elastic and strident almost to the point of aggressive; her words are a carapace. She has to say something, even if it’s a flagrantly hurtful observation about Annie’s scabby cheek. She does voices and speaks in puns (compulsive wordplay being a common affliction of Leigh’s characters). “Lovecats” is on the stereo—that yelping cosplay anthem of sexual neediness disguised as a cutesy, kittenish “bite and scratch”—and a love of the Cure is the first thing Hannah and Annie bond over. Like their apartment, and their friendship, it’s a space they can share; the music’s nervous energy matches their own.

But spaces change; gentrification is inevitable. (London real estate is key to this roommate drama, and it’s notable that the film’s only significant speaking part who doesn’t appear in any of the eighties flashbacks is a boorish futures trader, played by Andy Serkis, who lives in a luxury high-rise overlooking the Thames.) Cutting back and forth between a nineties present and an eighties past, Career Girls shows us the way the idiosyncrasies of youth are subsumed into the equilibrium (more or less) of adult personality—just as, for the nineties scenes, the music of the Cure gives way to the aural earth tones of Marianne Jean-Baptiste’s score. Fevered hormonal oscillations are smoothed out by supper-club smooth jazz. Punk is dead, sacrificed on the altar of adulthood. Skin clears up, twitches still themselves, without your doing. Time just . . . passes. Though old habits still resurface, like acne scars in a flush, Steadman gives Annie’s voice less of a quaver in the nineties scenes, and Cartlidge makes her voice less muscular. While their place in college was dark and dirty as a dive bar, with movie posters barely visible in the blue-lit murk, the old roomies reconnect in thirty-year-old Hannah’s attic flat in Kentish Town, which has a garden view and creamy walls reflecting natural light.

It’s Annie and Hannah’s grubby old student flat, over a Chinese takeaway at the corner of Rousden Street in Camden, that’s the film’s key location, chief among the many memories that come “flooding back” to Annie as she returns to a city still littered with traces of a life that used to be hers—especially of one moment forever linked in her mind with a Cure song. The film turns on memories of Hannah and Annie’s one-time couch-crasher Ricky (Mark Benton). Ricky, with his baby fat and greasy hair—shaved on the sides, long in the back—moves in with his armloads of records and blank tapes, and soon enough becomes a regular at the takeaway downstairs, making late-night runs for curry and chips. Guileless and helpless, Ricky rubs his face with his index finger—it’s his young-adult tic—and he squints when he talks, tightly. He can’t finish a sentence any more than he can read a room, though it’s painfully clear he has lots to say. 

One Saturday night, the three of them are home in the flat, Annie and Hannah pogoing around the living-room floor to “The Walk.” Carried along by the music, their movement brings their whole selves to the surface with heart-tearing transparency. Annie sways, head down; Hannah marches, almost martial. Ricky sits this one out on the couch, slouching but rapt—and so they make a project of him, grabbing an arm apiece and pulling him up. “Want to see you dancing,” Hannah says over the music, encouraging Ricky’s offbeat little hops. As Robert Smith sings, “I kissed you in the water / and made your dry lips sing,” Ricky falls into rhythm. These kids are not cool, but the scene nevertheless has the feeling of a happy memory, one of those dorm-room Polaroids that ever after stands in for the most emotional, eventful few years of your life.

Through a cloud formed of the smoke of several hours’ cigarettes, Ricky’s odd, repetitive hand gestures could almost be a dance move; he can shake his head and sway without worrying about taking up too much space. His haircut even looks punk. It’s the most natural any of them appear in the college years—their uncertain, stop-start presence in the physical world is in rhythm with the jumpy, joyful music. The post-chorus keyboard zips up and down—“The Walk” was the Cure’s first Top 20 hit, and the beginning of their transition into a poppier sound, into a polished New Wave shimmer and wide mainstream acceptance. Ricky lets loose too, plays air guitar and screams; then they all scream, explode unself-consciously out into the world.