Ian Hart

David Carr has questions, and Ian Hart lets them matter. In Ken Loach’s Land and Freedom (1995), we believe in his idealism because Hart allows him to question it. Hart makes belief look like something David has to think about, even when the dialogue is busy explaining the history. That is the quality we prize in him: he gives a committed man enough uncertainty to be credible without making him seem merely weak.

Playing John Lennon in The Hours and Times (1991) and Backbeat (1994) brought him notice, and he later described difficulty escaping the typecasting that followed. In Backbeat, he makes the familiar figure human without resorting to caricature. David Carr and Ginger in Nothing Personal (1995) gave him substantial roles beyond Lennon. The familiar description of Hart as an intense outsider is useful up to the point where it stops us noticing anything else, particularly his ability to make a character’s doubts interesting.

Loach gives us the clearest reason to look closer. The love story and the volunteers’ gentle humour give Hart room to belong to a group, rather than simply guide us through the history. We were moved by the disagreements because Hart makes them feel costly to people who have come to enjoy one another’s company. The film sometimes lets the dialogue run too long, and its framing story explains too much. Hart cannot remove those problems, but he keeps David worth attending to when the writing becomes a lesson.

The later credits resist a tidy label: the father in Liam (2000), Professor Quirrell in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (2001), then Father Beocca in The Last Kingdom (2015–2020). Those parts belong to a career that has continued across British independent films and international television. We would still start with Land and Freedom, where Loach gives him the space to think and other actors to respond to. Go for Hart, and allow the film its longer arguments.