One Big Sweaty, Gorgeous Party*

How Steve McQueen and his cast and crew created the year’s most unforgettable movie scene.

- Hunter Harris

SOME NIGHTS just unfurl before you. There’s the getting- ready phase, face crooked in the mirror, smearing on eye shadow or blush. Should I wear this shoe or that shoe? There’s the last-minute adjustment, a nervous fretting and fussing over the glittering look, and a rushing out the door. Who all’s gonna be there? The loose energy of a crowded party draws you in with the anticipation of shimmying up close to someone’s ear or sipping something pleasantly strong. There’s a momentum to this type of night out, the way one song pushes into the next, pulls you to the center of the room. There’s an amorous mood, like anything could happen, like something good certainly will. Remember going out? Remember nights so radiant, so alive with wanting, you could float home on their afterglow?

Lovers Rock, the second installment in Steve McQueen’s Small Axe film anthology, is about one such night in 1980, when a few dozen Black Londoners congregate at a house party to hold each other close and sway and thrash and grind. On paper, the film is a dreamy series of party scenes; onscreen, it’s a passionate, restless achievement. Love, frustration, togetherness are communicated in small gestures and details—a gently horny ass grab, a yearning gaze from across the room, a delightfully chaotic line for the bathroom. The rest of the Small Axe films feature racist cops, racist bosses, racist courts. Lovers Rock shows what happens when white people aren’t looking—the rapture in Black joy, experienced privately.