General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20267 min read

London Kills Me

London Kills Me is a 1991 British comedy-drama film written and directed by Hanif Kureishi, about a young Notting Hill drug dealer who tries to leave the drug world by taking a job as a waiter in a trendy restaurant, if he can first come up with a sensible pair of shoes.¹ It was Kureishi's debut as a director, made for Working Title Films on a small budget, and it followed his screenplays for My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (1987).²

Key fact	Detail
Release	13 December 1991 (Working Title); a Germany/United Kingdom production¹^•³
Director and writer	Hanif Kureishi, his directorial debut; produced by Tim Bevan²^•³
Premise	A drug dealer needs a "sensible" pair of shoes to take a waiter job and escape the Notting Hill drug scene¹
Lead cast	Justin Chadwick (Clint Eastwood), Steven Mackintosh (Muffdiver), Emer McCourt (Sylvie), Roshan Seth (Dr. Bubba), Fiona Shaw (Headley), Brad Dourif (Hemingway), Naveen Andrews (Bike)⁴
Running time	106 minutes (BFI); listed as 1h 47m on review aggregators³^•⁵
Principal locations	Trellick Tower, Golborne Road, Portobello Road and the Electric Cinema in Notting Hill; filming began 21 January 1991⁶
US box office	$169.0K gross; rated R for drug use, language and sexual situations⁵

Spoilers

Plot and characters

The central character is a twenty-year-old homeless drug dealer named Clint Eastwood (Justin Chadwick), who takes his name from the actor. He decides to go straight and applies for a job as a waiter at a chic restaurant whose owner, Hemingway (Brad Dourif), promises to hire him if he returns wearing a good pair of shoes. The search for footwear drives a series of escapades with his friends, a squat-dwelling group of small-time dealers called "the posse," led by the ambitious Muffdiver (Steven Mackintosh), who is reluctant to let Clint leave. Sylvie (Emer McCourt), a drug addict who lives with the two men and divides her affections between them, is eventually inspired to seek an ordinary life herself.⁷^•⁸

The supporting cast includes Roshan Seth as Dr. Bubba, a Sufi guru who runs a meditation center on the ground floor of the building the posse squats in and takes a tolerant view of their behavior, and Naveen Andrews as Bike, a near-silent member of the group who is never separated from his bicycle.⁷^•⁵ Fiona Shaw plays Headley and Tony Haygarth plays Burns.⁴

Production

Kureishi described how Working Title Films gave him the chance to direct a story with good actors on a small budget, a common pathway for writers moving into direction at the time. He worked with the American cinematographer Ed Lachman. The film was set in Notting Hill as the area was being gentrified; Kureishi had spent much time around Portobello Road and was drawn to what he called its decadence, its mix of races and classes, and its lawlessness and creativity, with the rich beginning to move into houses still semi-derelict after the war.²

He later wrote that his first days of filming were disorienting: as a writer he was unused to questions about set dressing, costumes, lenses and lighting, and he found filmmaking practical and expensive where writing was free, forced to think about budget, actor availability, and snow on several days of the shoot.² A Glasgow University thesis records that Kureishi based the script on journalistic research, interviewing Glyn Roberts, a young drug dealer living in a Notting Hill squat whose life underlay the film.⁹

Kureishi framed the film's subject in generational terms: "I basically wanted to make a film about kids on the street with nothing. There was an idealism to the youth culture of the '60s and '70s, but these kids don't believe they're going to change anything and aren't interested in making a statement."¹

Locations

The film was shot in and around Portobello market in Notting Hill. Documented locations include Trellick Tower seen from the railway bridge on Golborne Road, 105 Golborne Road (the site of Mr Hemingway's diner), the Electric Cinema on Portobello Road, the Ground Floor bar at 186 Portobello Road (then the Colville Rose), the flea market, and the Portfolio postcard shop at the corner of Golborne and Bevington Road, which appears as a restaurant and later appeared in the film Notting Hill in the late 1990s.⁶^•¹⁰ A local history account dubbed the film "Carry On Homeless" and judged it a realistic portrayal of the local acid-house rave scene, if a failed homage to the film Performance.¹⁰

The film also contains railway scenes: characters board a Network SouthEast slam-door unit at a London terminus, leave Goring and Streatley station in the Thames Valley as a Class 117 DMU departs, and the ending includes Steven Mackintosh on a Southern Region electric unit at London Waterloo followed by a shot of Class 421 4 CIG EMU No. 1762 departing Portsmouth Harbour station.¹¹

Reception

Critical response was largely unfavorable. Time Out called it Kureishi's directing debut that "means well," but found the plotting wayward, the performances charmless and the direction flat, and judged that it rarely rang true as a portrait of Notting Hill life.¹² Jonathan Romney, reviewing in New Statesman & Society at release, wrote that the film "falls because it has precious little to say about characters who have precious little to say."¹³ The Washington Post's Rita Kempley described it as a "painfully self-aware" look at street subculture and found Kureishi, as a first-time director, "almost as clueless as his vaguely inert and juvenile characters."¹⁴ On Rotten Tomatoes the film holds a Tomatometer of 59% from four reviews.⁵

Not all notices were dismissive. Peter Rainer of the Los Angeles Times acknowledged Kureishi's "voluminous imagination" and compared the film's structure to Gus Van Sant's My Own Private Idaho, seeing Godard's influence in Kureishi's "almost abstract dispassion," while concluding that the posse never takes hold of the imagination or becomes a generational portrait.⁷ The Independent later called it an "ill-conceived debut as a film director" that "collapsed into a droopy, druggie puddle."¹⁵ Retrospective commentary has noted that the film never secured the critical attention of Kureishi's mid-1980s work with Stephen Frears, and several reviewers suggested it would have been better served by an experienced director such as Frears.¹⁶^•¹⁷

Place in Kureishi's career

The film is often grouped with My Beautiful Laundrette and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid as an informal trilogy of films about Britain under the Conservatives, and it was Kureishi's only feature as director.¹⁸ Kureishi himself wrote that the experience of directing taught him how much a writer works alone, and that he found himself "in the middle of a hurricane, organising a large group of demanding people," concluding that he was not naturally a leader; the episode informed his later collaborations, and he never directed again.²^•¹⁸ The published screenplay appeared in London Kills Me: Three Screenplays and Four Essays (Penguin, 1992) and in his Collected Screenplays (Faber and Faber).¹⁹^•²⁰ As of early 2026 the film had no streaming offer in the United Kingdom and was available on Blu-ray.²¹

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026