Idris Elba stars in 'Beasts of No Nation'

REVIEWS of the harrowing child-soldier movie "Beasts of No Nation" often deal with its financing, and while that seems tactless, it is also relevant.

"Beasts" was funded by Netflix, and will be released on that streaming platform shortly after the movie opens in theaters (though it would be a shame to watch on a mobile device or laptop).

Filmmakers hope that Netflix will be a hands-off source of support at a time when Hollywood is increasingly operating via over-cautious and sometimes cowardly corporate decision-making.

They hope Netflix will be a home for filmmakers who want the same kind of elbow room granted to artists at HBO - directors like Cary Fukunaga, who directed the first season of "True Detective" and is the director of "Beasts of No Nation," taken from Uzodinma Iweala's novel about child soldiers in war-torn West Africa.

Certainly "Beasts of No Nation" has the feel of a book that's true to the strange, lyrical brutality of its source material - it has a dream-like opulence that shape-shifts into a nightmare, less an issue movie than Coppola or Herzog lost in the jungle, showing us lost men descending into madness.

There is a Brando-like figure here, played by Idris Elba, a commandant who leads a motley army of men and boys on a series of guerilla raids through the countryside of an (unnamed) African country and toward a capital city targeted by the larger rebel army.

Elba is magnetic, but not in any kind of showy way. He plays magnetism as his character's animating ingredient - it's not ideology or politics or military objectives that bind these fighters together, it's his sheer force of personality, his eerie talent for manipulation.

To that end, we see him take a fearful boy (whose own village has just been obliterated) and, via practiced psychological sleight of hand, transform him from a terrified child into a killer.

The movie's key scene shows us the grotesque initiation of the boy (Abraham Atta), the moment when he "bloods in" - is forced to kill an unarmed man with a machete. There are other horrifying incidents, all building toward the little army's entry to the capitol.

The widescreen movie is a marvel to look at - Fukunaga shows the sense of scale and color evinced in "Sin Nombre."

It s a style that gets on some people's nerves. Some find his compositions too pretty, over-styled. But I sense something honest in Fukunaga's motives - he wants to put you there, with his characters, to anchor you with a vivid sense of place (the movie was filmed in Ghana). It's not a failing to note that the place has a lush beauty at odds with actions of the men who inhabit it (in a Terrence Malick movie, these are Eden metaphors).

Even the urban settings are something to see, a visual poem describing disintegration of a movement, the disillusion of an army.

We never sense there is much chance these child soldiers will accomplish anything useful, but the sight of a foreign businessman, briefcase in hand, outside the newly minted president's office, is quietly devastating nonetheless.

The rebellion gives way to the pragmatic and corrupt business of governing, and children learn what grown-up soldiers already know - they are expendable.

Whether they are redeemable and reclaimable is the movie's parting question.