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If you’re going to make a biopic about an abused child who grows up to be a bare-knuckle boxer, it might help to hire an actor who looks like he can actually handle himself in a scrap or two.
Not Telstar director Nick Moran, though, who hands the role to the pasty-faced Rupert Friend in a downbeat hard-luck story that desperately wants to be Britain’s answer to Precious.
The miscasting doesn’t stop there thanks to Natascha McElhone’s outlandish turn as Rupert’s mother, a screeching fishwife who looks like she’s stepped off the pages of Viz.
Yet the real flaw here is The Kid’s crunching lack of subtlety, Moran turning Kevin Lewis’ autobiographical tell-all into one long, lurid wallow in society’s dregs.
