In a despairing, dystopian social drama, how about this for utopianism: your housing estate has its own pirate radio station, and Ian Wright, the former Arsenal and England striker, gamely mans the mic, offering one of the better recent film performances by an ex-professional athlete. It feels like a personal touch from North London-raised actor and now director Daniel Kaluuya – the sort you get away with when colouring in the side details of your first movie – coupled with the additional aura of Black Mirror, in whose UK-produced first season he first won attention as a leading man.

With the UK capital’s urban degeneration and social tensions in his sights, Kaluuya, co-directing with Kibwe Tavares, whose background in architectural design clearly makes an impact, alights on an inner-city housing estate nicknamed the “Kitchen”, some decades from now – at once futuristically teeming with hidden passageways and a monumentally imposing design, as well as facing catastrophic neglect from the local city authority. Premiering as the closing-night film at BFI London, the Netflix-supported production The Kitchen will have most resonance at home, chiming with urban series already popular on that platform, such as Top Boy, yet one of its chief achievements is making a UK semi-social realist film, for once, feel like its francophone equivalent, the banlieue drama, with its attendant, empowering calls to arms.

Our lead is Izi (Kane Robinson), an upwardly mobile resident of the Kitchen, whose relation to it is complicated. With the Kitchen premises – which have the mass and height of the MI6 building on the Thames – set to be condemned and bulldozed, he is awaiting news on his application to the Buena Vida estate (a name cheekily recalling the Walt Disney sub-studio). This is a futuristic new development he’s been saving up for a property at through his job at the very weird eco-funeral service Life After Life, which allows the newly deceased to be reconstituted into plants, to repopulate the greenery which is surely flagging in this future world. For the sci-fi requirement of world building, Kaluuya, Tavares and co-writer Joe Murtagh produce undeniably sturdy work, keyed into the particulars of London, rather than devising a generic “future city”.

Yet as other early notices on The Kitchen have said, the other story in the film’s foreground has an underdeveloped and, at worst, sugary quality. Izi takes the young Benji (Jedaiah Bannerman) under his wing, having realised he’s processed the funeral of the boy’s late mother. Whilst the relationship and the inner conflict it causes for Izi links to his overall guilt about his weakening solidarity towards the Kitchen, the film still resorts to surprisingly sentimental, odd-couple bonding beats, as the older and younger man size one another up, alongside the possibility that Izi is actually Benji’s father.

Whilst this primary dramaturgy unfortunately flags against the backdrop underpinning it, the key irony is that The Kitchen’s social prognosis is precisely mirrored in London life today, rather than being a speculative future threat: the lives of those in social housing are marred by evictions and resettlements, rather than by the bombast of militarised police and City of London-branded attack drones swarming the concrete walls. The future is already here, and perhaps it’s more evenly distributed than we think, to invert William Gibson’s much-cited quote. The Kitchen deserves kudos, and viewers interested in new British cinema, for grasping this.

The Kitchen is a UK production, staged by DMC Film, 59%, Factory Fifteen and Film4. World distribution is by Netflix.