Deborah Ross

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

The film has its heart in the right place: it is rousing in parts, and warming in parts, but it will also will leave you cold in parts

Utterly beguiling: Max Harwood as Jamie Campbell in Everybody’s Talking About Jamie 
issue 18 September 2021

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.

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