A pep-talk nightmare: Everybody's Talking About Jamie reviewed

It’s a hard heart that doesn’t warm to the musical drama Everybody’s Talking About Jamie. I don’t have a hard heart, and I was warmed, but I also have an impatient heart and my patience was sometimes tested. There’s a point in this film where you might, for example, be asking yourself: do we really need yet another song about empowerment set in the school canteen? Or: can we not have another a pep talk about being true to yourself? On reflection, I would say my heart was only around 42 per cent warmed, at a guess.

The starting point for the whole Jamie phenomenon was a BBC3 documentary about a working-class 16-year-old from Sheffield, Jamie Campbell, who aspired to be a drag queen and wanted to go to his school prom in a dress. This was in 2011, before gender or RuPaul or any of that was part of the conversation, and he’d been bullied and insulted all his life, and it’s remarkable. (The original documentary is also on Amazon.) It was adapted for the stage by the writer and lyricist Tom MacRae, with music by Dan Gillespie Sells, and opened at the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield before transferring to the West End and then other cities all over the world. It is very big in Japan.

You may be saying to yourself: can we not have yet another pep talk about being true to yourself?

This film adaptation has the same director as the stage version (Jonathan Butterell) while newcomer Max Harwood, who is utterly beguiling, plays Jamie. Jamie lives with his unfailingly supportive mother Margaret (Sarah Lancashire, who provides most of the film’s emotional heft), while desperately seeking the approval of his appalled, deadbeat father. (‘Boys should do boy things,’ says Dad.) Jamie is openly gay but only his mother, his mother’s best friend (Shobna Gulati), and his best friend Pritti (Lauren Patel) know of his dream, which is born when Margaret gives him a pair of red glittery high heels for his birthday.