Robbie COLLIN
Everybody’s Talking About Jamie 12A cert, 115 min ★★★★★
Dir: Jonathan Butterell
Starring: Max Harwood,
Sarah Lancashire, Richard E Grant, Sharon Horgan, Lauren Patel, Samuel Bottomley, Shobna Gulati, Ralph Ineson
Alittle over a month ago, Janicza Bravo’s Zola proved that even a viral Twitter thread could be remodelled into stylish, penetrating cinema. Everybody’s Talking About Jamie tries to do the same for BBC Three documentaries, and falls some way short. This tiringly garish British musical was inspired by the 2011 fly-on-the-wall programme Jamie: Drag Queen at 16, which followed a County Durham schoolboy who, two years after coming out as gay, vows to attend his school prom in a dress, and delves into the world of drag. The tale’s theatrical potential was spotted by the Sheffield-born choreographer Jonathan Butterell, who worked with the television writer Tom Macrae and the songwriter Dan Gillespie Sells, frontman of the rock group The Feeling, to turn it into a stage show. The result opened in February 2017 and is still playing four years later in London’s West End. So this screen version, also directed by Butterell and set and shot in his home town, must have seemed an obvious next step.
Oh well. Perhaps this is just one of those stories whose emotional mechanisms only click when it’s live and screaming in a theatre. On screen, it comes over as an all-rasping, all-galumphing hymn to attentionseeking: imagine a version of Billy Elliot in which you found yourself quietly rooting for the kid to trip over his ballet pumps. Jamie himself is a necessarily striking presence. Played by 24-yearold newcomer Max Harwood, he has the eyebrows and cheekbones of a matinee idol, the legs of a Tiller Girl, and feathered lemon curd locks. He is also as camp as Butlin’s, and almost nobody around him has the slightest problem with this: the exceptions are his father (Ralph Ineson), who resents Jamie for not being the rough-andtumble, football-loving lad he wanted, and the class bully (Samuel Bottomley), with his creaky portfolio of 1980s homophobic jibes. Jamie certainly has issues to work through, all traceable to the paternal rejection he first felt when dad found him trying on mum’s make-up: a memory relived in not one but two Vaseline-smeared flashbacks. But considering he has the support of his classmates – not to mention the unstinting adoration of his mother (Sarah Lancashire) – you’d struggle to describe him as oppressed, so when he describes the prom dress wheeze to best friend Pritti (Lauren Patel) as a “second coming-out”, it’s hard to feel that much more than ego is at stake.
Still, in wafts Richard E Grant as former drag artiste Loco Chanelle, who secures Jamie a slot at the local social club’s female impersonator night where he can road test his alter ego. The dash of moul de ringtragi fabulousness Grant brings to proceedings is something to behold, recalling his terrific, Oscar-nominated work as a louche, Hiv-positive swindler in 2018’s Can You Ever Forgive Me?. A year after making that film, Grant said in an interview that he believed it was hard to “justify” casting straight actors in gay roles. Yet here he is – and he’s good, which is the only justification required.
The film’s brand-new song, This Was Me, is his character’s aching-hearted reminiscence of the Aids epidemic in the 1980s, though this is mostly performed by Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s Holly Johnson in ungrant-like tones. The other numbers are a mixed bag, with an abundance of empowerment pop-rock and one toe-curling ballad which casts Jamie’s mum as a cartoon of maternal selfabnegation, delivered by Lancashire late at night while hunched over a sewing machine. Again, this stuff is easier to sell from a stage than through a screen: the same goes for the numerous sub-panto gags including Pritti’s description of Emmeline Pankhurst as “like Beyoncé, back in’t day”.
Thoughtful adjustments and cuts have been made elsewhere to render the material more cinematic. And the film does strike one convincing emotional note: the puzzlement that must come (or at least once came) with being young, gay and working class, and not seeing an obvious route out of your teens. But these subtler notes are soon drowned out by the latest barrage of grimacing uplift, while every scene stomps along in the same look-at-me strut. Drag is what it is, and drag is what it does.
On Amazon Prime from today