Heroin

‘You can’t pick your parents, but they get to pick your life,’ Jonathan Tepper points out at the beginning of this extraordinary coming-of-age story. And: ‘If your parents are missionaries, it changes everything... They decide where you’ll live, when you’ll pack your bags and go, and you’ll get roped into their work saving the lost.’ In the 1980s and 1990s Jonathan’s parents, Elliott and Mary, were American missionaries in San Blas, then the poorest part of Madrid: ‘Our neighbourhood was the biggest drug supermarket not only in Spain but in all of Europe.’ At a time when Spain hadn’t started spending on prevention or rehabilitation, Jonathan, aged seven, along with his two older brothers – all of them blond and blue-eyed – saw junkies lying dead in ditches.

Ellen Barkin, Al Pacino’s lover-cum-prime- suspect in his comeback movie Sea of Love (1989), once dismissed the artifice of the British acting tradition (by way of an oddly ill-tempered pop at Nigel Havers) by comparing it with the immersive naturalism of the greats of post-war American cinema: Marlon Brando, Meryl Streep, Robert De Niro and Al Pacino. It’s a questionable claim, especially given that in Pacino Barkin had perhaps the least naturalistic co-star imaginable. He is forever searching for the off-beat, the syncopation that will spring the line open Pacino is – albeit in his own highly idiosyncratic way – no less theatrical an actor than John Gielgud, more invested in the musicality of his line readings than in fidelity to the real.