'I, Daniel Blake' offers moving portrait of resilience amid despair

Almost one year ago, "I, Daniel Blake" won the Palme d'Or at Cannes, but it is only now fetching up on our shores. A slice of British working-class life from director Ken Loach and screenwriter Paul Laverty, this affecting portrait of an unemployed craftsman desperately trying to return to a life of dignity and productivity gives the lie to the myth that there are no films celebrating white working-class culture.

Known as a comedian, Dave Johns delivers an astonishingly moving turn as the title character, a 59-year-old woodworker who has been out of work since a heart attack and is now navigating the state bureaucracy to get his job back. "I, Daniel Blake" opens with a dark screen, with only the voice of a social worker interviewing Blake about his health and prospects heard; back at his modest flat, Daniel chides his neighbors for leaving their rubbish out, then continues his war on bureaucratic inertia while staying on hold for up to two hours in a Kafkaesque game of attrition.

A superficial reading of "I, Daniel Blake" might leave the impression that Loach and Laverty are critiquing Britain's bloated and oppressive welfare state, but their true target is privatization: The social workers and employment "professionals" at the jobs office are all hired by an American contractor. Efficiency, rather than efficacy, is the goal in an operation that often seems cynically structured to guarantee enough shame and frustration on the part of clients that they'll ultimately give up.

But Daniel is not one to give up, whether he's trying to become computer-savvy, or to help Katie (Hayley Squires), a young single mother he takes under his wing. A scene in which Katie breaks down in a food bank is but one of several small, shattering masterpieces that compose "I, Daniel Blake," which in the end succumbs to melodramatic stagecraft but still brims with spirit and sympathy.