The breakout star of Steve McQueen's Blitz is an 11-year-old boy

In the crowded field of wartime films, it's difficult for a new release to stand apart from its predecessors in the same genre - but Sir Steve McQueen's epic Blitz, which tells the story of World War II largely through the eyes of a nine-year-old boy, seems to have made an impression in the well-trodden path.

Praised across the board by critics, Blitz has been hailed 'one of the greatest war films ever made' as it charts the odyssey of George, a mixed heritage boy who has been evacuated but, bullied by his peers, escapes to head back to his mother (Saoirse Ronan) in London.

As critics hail McQueen's epic, released on AppleTV on Nove a wartime tale for the ages told from a child's perspective, it's 11-year-old Elliott Heffernan, who plays young George, who has wowed viewers across the board with his 'perfect' performance.

Heffernan has left critics astounded with a nuanced depiction of a child navigating the terror wartime Britain alone, while also beginning to understand his identity as a person of colour in a predominantly white society, whose Grenadian father has been deported.

And some may be surprised to learn that the role in which Heffernan has stunned audiences is his very first, as the young actor was recruited in an open casting call two years ago. As he navigates his new career, he has likened the bright lights of the film world to being at 'Disneyland'. 

Elliott, who is thought to be filming his next title in Europe after the success of Blitz, is from the UK and auditioned for the role of George through a nationwide open casting call.

The talented young actor still appears baffled by the bright lights of international acclaim, and in a moving snap posted on his Instagram account on Wednesday, the actor stood humbly by a poster of himself and Ronan on a Soho bus stop with the caption: 'It's me.' 

Speaking on the red carpet in London at the premiere of Blitz, he revealed what it was like to work with Sir Steve McQueen, director of 12 Years a Slave and Small Axe.

Speaking to the BFI, Elliott said: 'Steve [McQueen] was very focused on finishing the film but even though he was serious at some times, he always left a little room to have fun because I was nine, to make it more of a good first impression of filming.

'He was very encouraging and supportive, like, I could be filming and he'd be like, 'Come on George you can do it! You can do it George, come on!' 

'Yeah Steve was very nice.'

And McQueen's praise of his breakout star is just as warm.

He has said of Elliott: 'I'm just grateful, in a way, I feel as an artist quite useful, because seeing war through kids' eyes, a child's eyes, is kind of sobering.'

He said Heffernan 'merged' seamlessly into the character of George.

'The maturity and comprisal was pretty astounding.'

Elliott is now represented by the Sylvia Young Agency, based in London, one of the top talent agencies for children and young actors in the UK, as he becomes hot property in the film and TV industry.

And it's no surprise he's backed by such a huge name; particularly as critics now rave about his sophisticated performance alongside Ronan in the McQueen epic.

The Daily Mail's Brian Viner says of the young actor: 'It’s Heffernan on whom the credibility of the story rests, and his young shoulders carry the burden comfortably.'

The Telegraph's Robbie Collin described 'wonderful' Elliot's performance as 'both clear and enigmatic' as he depicts a young boy who doesn't fully understand the weight of questions of his identity.

Meanwhile the Independent's Clarisse Loughrey describes how Elliott's performance depicts George's understanding of his identity 'with such grace'.

'He's a stoic boy, in a way that seems to confront us as an audience, yet never severed from all the fear, loneliness, and mischief of a child in wartime,' she writes.

Deadline simply describes newcomer Heffernan as 'perfect' in his role.

As Heffernan enters the big and bold world of showbusiness, he has confirmed he will continue acting.

Speaking to Deadline at the London premiere of Blitz, he said he 'definitely' wants to continue exploring film and TV in his career.

When asked what he likes about starring in films, he said: 'Meeting new people, going to different places and just seeing how films are made. 

'It's kind of like when you're going to Disneyland for the first time, you know, and then you just see everything it's just... it's mind blowing.'

Blitz review: Perilous trip into wartime underworld for the Blitz's Oliver Twist, writes BRIAN VINER  

Blitz (PG)

Verdict: An explosive start 

Rating:

This year’s London Film Festival could not have had a more appropriate curtain-raiser last night than Blitz, a stirring drama set in September 1940, just after the Luftwaffe began its intense eight-month bombing campaign on the city.

It felt downright eerie to leave the cinema on London’s Southbank and see, across the Thames, the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral – once the city’s structural symbol of ­resistance against Hitler.

Working-class Londoners, of course, have always been a human symbol of resistance in World War II, depicted over and over on screen as the epitome of doughty, selfless pluck.

But in Blitz, writer-director Sir Steve McQueen is not afraid to blow up that time-honoured image.

Some of the characters in this ­enjoyably absorbing film have distilled the cherished Blitz spirit into­ something sour. For instance, while everyone else is rolling out the barrel, there’s a criminal gang at work, stripping the dead of their jewels.

McQueen’s focus is an East End family of three. Single mum Rita (Saoirse Ronan) shares a terraced house with her nine-year-old son George (impressive newcomer Elliott Heffernan), and her dad Gerald (played by musician Paul Weller in his screen-acting debut).

The boy is mixed-race, the product of Rita’s relationship with a West Indian man, who has since been deported.

McQueen, whose own parents also came from the West Indies, was by all accounts inspired to ­create this yarn by a single wartime photograph of a young black evacuee.

Race and racism duly loom large. But, in essence, it’s an old-fashioned adventure story about a spirited kid who is furious when his devoted mother reluctantly decides that he must be evacuated and isn’t convinced by her hollow rhapsodies about the countryside. ‘Cows and horses smell,’ he says.

A little later he jumps off the train whisking him to safety and embarks on his arduous odyssey home.

Blitz is a chronicle of that return trip, which predictably, for dramatic purposes, is fraught with peril.

Nonetheless, McQueen still smartly subverts our expectations, evoking The Railway Children (1970) when George jumps aboard another train and befriends three young brothers who have done the same thing – only for tragedy to bring our own sentimental journey to a screeching halt.

There are plainly deliberate echoes of Oliver Twist, too, when George is introduced by a kind of Nancy figure to this story’s version of Bill Sikes, played by Stephen Graham, with Kathy Burke as his grotesquely-painted partner-in-crime. 

One presumes their gang of thieves has a basis in reality.

Throughout, McQueen deftly weaves fact with ­fiction. 

The aftermath of the bombing of the Cafe de Paris (which actually happened in March 1941) is meticulously re-created, and there really was a noisy campaign by Londoners to be allowed to shelter in Tube stations, which brings me neatly to Paul ‘Going Underground’ Weller.

The so-called ‘Modfather’ is boldly but perfectly cast as a wartime East End grandfather – and looks exactly as if he might be Ronan’s old dad.

She’s wonderful too, as she always is, as a mother at her wits’ end with worry. 

But it’s Heffernan on whom the credibility of the story rests, and his young shoulders carry the burden comfortably.

The other thing that McQueen has to get right –and does – is the particular tumult and trauma of the London Blitz. 

The film opens spectacularly with a fireman being knocked senseless by an out-of-control hose, and later there’s a brilliantly orchestrated scene in which a Tube station is flooded.

I had only one real niggle: while sheltering from the bombs, a Nigerian ARP ­warden called Ife (Benjamin Clementine), apparently based on a real person, makes a speech about tolerance to a small gathering conveniently comprising a Sikh, a Jew and a white bigot, who has pegged up a bedsheet as a means of segregation.

It’s a wincingly confected episode, which comes far too obviously from a screenwriter’s keyboard, and is emblematic of McQueen’s more ­general and rather surprising failure to get prejudice quite right. 

There are some horrid racists in his story and everyone else is entirely colourblind, but society doesn’t work like that now, and I’m sure it was even more nuanced in 1940.

That aside, he has made a fine picture, which has got the 68th London Film Festival off to a thunderous start. Blitz opens in cinemas on November 1.